Pre sent tense

Frank Elbaz Gallery, Dallas [link]

Exhibition: Oct 10, 2020 – Jan 9, 2021
Published by Glasstire // Nov. 17, 2020

Any exhibit at the moment must do more than show up or show off. It needs to relate. Our human compulsion to connect has been distanced and distended, and by extension any art that can reach us must first acknowledge this state of tight drawn anxiousness: the stress of too much noise and too little movement, of too much fatalism and deferred agency.

Pre Sent Tense at Frank Elbaz Gallery recognizes the strain and offers fluctuating salves from humorous pathos to humble reminders of human moments, gently allowing us to vacillate between our dueling impulses to either manically confront the obvious or never discuss it again.

Leavitt’s painting Roller, Reflection, Feildstone addresses the moment rather accurately: the blank-faced corporate avatars are paired with a gut-churning rollercoaster. The casually forced normalcy required of work teleconferencing tends to become neurotically hysterical in its denial of both the internal and external reality, and yet that faux-normalcy of enacting our daily role serves as a lifeline to which we cling.

This strange moment of holding on –surviving— requires a force of will, but equally it does not accede to ambition. It offers a space where normal motivations are short-sighted and long-term planning distasteful… and yet almost everything is excusable, given the circumstances. This allows the present to somehow operate outside of normal time. Echoing this sentiment, Mungo Thomson’s diptych of blank TIME covers rejects our self-obsessive chronicling with the more apropos vacuous, dueling versions of nothing. This inability to know when “normal time” will resume (and with it normal behaviors and mores) tends to distort time and priorities, much as Viktor Frankl discusses prisoners without a release date feeling as though a day would last a week and a week would pass as nothing.

Equally relevant for Thomson’s grand, bland TIME is that it proposes a counter to our increased media consumption: no news, just eternity. Pondering such weighty matters may prevent the self-distortion that stems from over-consuming media, an odd phenomenon in which an excess of time devolves people into unrecognizable beings.

When considering time we tend to think on the past and plan for the future, both of which further amplify or exacerbate our current, static (yet intensely spastic) state. We are relegated to only live in the present. And from here we must find comfort in the momentary, or in the odd pathos of being human.

For instance, the irregular rhythmic coalescing and diverging of bodies in Ari Marcopoulos’ Park Notes transfers the hypnotic enthusiasm of kids playing pickup basketball. Their absorption into a moment produces a set of unscripted movements, granting gleeful escape as the body empathizes with the team mechanics of murmuration. The once every day, slightly banal, action somehow functions as a release and reminder of a life somewhat untethered.

That escape into the charm of the everyday is echoed in Marcopoulos’ photos and William Leavitt’s small acrylic pieces finding poetic moments in the remarkable unremarkable. This tendency to capture the previously mundane as a means to communicate the magic in commonality also introduces the salve of quirkiness into the exhibit, such as Mungo Thomson’s Snowman or Kaz Oshiro’s Fender Champ (Assholes).

Thomson’s stack of delivered Uniqlo and Amazon boxes is hysterically wasteful. The small bronze sculpture, meticulously painted with labels and tape, is a brilliantly sardonic altar to our most relatable gods: the ones to which we tithe, sacrifice our evenings, and demand our desires fulfilled. Similarly, Kaz Oshiro’s trompe l’oeil painted canvas sculpture as a guitar amp presents an object of noise, angst, and potential rebellion as a silent relic. Its fetishized glory illustrates the subversion of rage and utility into yet another consumable style… and still it’s nostalgic pull and obvious mastery through dedicated time and effort is reminiscent of a cargo cult’s desire to build the plane, though it cannot fly, in the hopes of luring the audience back.

Pre Sent Tense offers a unique sensation of acceptance and coping. It is not doom-scrolling or self-aggrandizing or politicizing, but rather saying we encounter similar frustrations, and here is a bit of hedonic time wasting, and a momentary reflection of life, and some sardonic jokes keeping us human.

~ Ryder