Thursday, November 9, 2017

Chadwick Rantanen at Secession


(link)

"For his sculptures, Rantanen extracted the protective layer from rolls of new fabric, peeling it off like a layer of skin" like hospital's common procedure on horribly disfigured patients is to shave off sections of intact flesh into luncheon-meat-like sheets then run though a press into a mesh to be grafted over raw violence, like wallpaper pasted for cheery buildings hiding this slaughter, skins of paper garbage caught with arrows like St. Sebastian trussed with nice bondage knots, plastic bags caught in razor wire fencing, our trauma over mass trash hung over industrial steel drain pans portending the dripping we don't see but Rantanen has us inferring looming, like the plastics entering our blood, another sort of sublimated torture chamber type of deal.