Caroline Mesquita at Blaffer Art Museum & Soshiro Matsubara at Bel Ami, Los Angeles

(Mesquita, Matsubara)

Today two theatrical sculpture exhibitions, itself remarkable, but further both detail two stories of women accosted by objects. We need a Freudian for what's in the air. Dreams and desire and uncanny dolls, in our white theaters, skulls projected. We need a doctor, and not just one who plays one on this screen. 

Caroline Mesquita at Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle & PIVÔ

(CdCP, PIVÔ)

The carapace, hard upper, shingles, a shell, a roof, an exoskeleton, a home. Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. This would be the recurring theme. A suggestion of what's inside.

See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

(link)

have oft nightmares of the things that run underneath the earth. Wasn't that a major plot point of  Ghostbusters? Nightmares manifested as physical slime, the collective bad vibes of a city?  gives image to what we all feel as the undercurrents of sociality, culture, we say the city was "electric" but when the mood goes sour feels like beneath the faces of everyone pumps black bile. 20th century surrealism seemed too preoccupied with the mythos of artistic genius, and everyone's paintings explored personal psyche which led to Hollywood giving more spectacular manifestations of cultural rather personal psyche. Isn't there a movie where Tom Hanks is almost drown in his suburban basement by a pipe pumping it full of shit? Or is this another nightmare. Artists have a whole history digging holes - outdoors, in studio, in gallery, in life - but one would like for a genealogy of pipes. Nightmare pipes, a genre.


see too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Caroline Mesquita at T293

(link)

The PR mentions Giger for whom the mechanistic and biomorphic found waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic. And like the Iron Giant for beyond parental guidance suggested, we can anthropomorphize steel so long as it reflects our own curvature: what looks like a wormy finger in one starts to look in another like a butthole. Metal is as malleable as you want it to be, can conform your desire, and thus have no issue identifying our own corporeality with metal. It's when we go on T293's website and look at the additional photos there and realize the butt's hole contains a jagged and unformed hangnail like a fishhook that we reject its allure.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink, Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center,