Thursday, May 12, 2016

Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

21b
(link)

Mass market crap given torture burden, little batteries tasked oversized objects, drones that will exhaust soon. AAA batteries have a little under half the ampere-hours of their AA counterparts and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. The director of fetish crush films Jeff Valencia speaks often of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed.


See too: Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing“Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture CenterDylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento