Paradise still lost
Erotic art show heavy on the T&A at Elevation
The art exhibition In the Realm of Eden offers proof that if you send out a call for erotic art, you will be answered with a deluge of nudity to rival Mardi Gras at the Playboy Mansion.
Eden is the gargantuan, insanely uneven, unprofitably democratic second group show at the spanking new Elevation Gallery in the West End’s booming Candler-Smith Warehouse district.
The show’s premise is recapturing the “artist’s search for a lost paradise.” Before the serpent, the apple and that whole misunderstanding arose, Eden asserts, everyone was naked. And Lo, It Was Good. It’s the Bible by way of Berkeley in the ’60s.
The majority of participating artists in Eden seem to locate paradise about 10 inches below the bellybutton. To take the most direct route, viewers can plunge their hands into the soft fabric sculptural work “Orchid Flexocum” by Kyrin Parsell, a surprisingly lovely rendition of a vagina that viewers are invited to “explore.” The concept sounds grotesque, but the work has a playfulness and, oddly enough, a romantic quality with its rich red and burgundy velvets. Parsell’s offbeat “not-your-mama’s sewing circle” craftiness also adds a touch of invention to a show that can be a tedious accumulation of uneventful male and female nudes.
Curated by Andy Wallace and David Mendoza, Eden is a significant venture off the conceptual path trod by the first, very promising Elevation Gallery show Vegas Baby! in which artists evoked the contemporary sensibility of that tawdry town in toxic colors and ersatz materials.
If Vegas was very Now, Eden is very Then. In keeping with the conventions of art history, Eden presents the overwhelming representation of women as mute, vacant symbols with no agency or will of their own — a repetition, centuries later, of the old hackneyed conceits of art history.
In Eden there are bound female nudes, goth female nudes and grieving female nudes. There are female bodies draped over rocks, ornamenting doorways, made into vases and given the hot wax, glistening sheen of racing cars in dorm room poster art. The effect is numbing. So many bodies, so little to say.
It therefore comes as a relief when certain artists manage to address the nude or the themes of the show in a provocative way. Brooke Colella’s delicate, wispy folk art-meets-Picasso drawings, for instance, restore a sweetness and individuality to “woman” that is stripped away in the anonymous, headless, soft-core eroticism of much of the work. And Mike Vinette’s raunchy sculpture featuring suggestive vaginal imagery and unsubtle jutting penises invests sex with an element of Rabelaisian comedy that feels especially welcome amidst the very serious, very dull T&A. The artist or organization known as Red Cellar at first appears to mimic the airbrushed, glossy perfection of cheesecake photography and porn. But then you realize that in these leering, glistening, butt-thrusting, tummy sucking-in images, all roles — male and female — are played by the same model. The work is a fitting touche to the unchanging, polymorphous perversity of the porn imagination while also playing with the Eve-made-of-Adam imagery of Bible lore.
Work that toys with sexual conventions succeeds where so much in this show fails. Such is the case with Yun Bai’s “Porn Flower” collages of skin magazines formed into botanicals — previously shown at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Also on display is the artist’s more recent work, oddly lyrical, troubling close-ups of nipples coupled with sexual confessions from their owners. Ron Witherspoon mocks our prurient interest in dirty secrets in his purposefully indecipherable, fuzzy series of “Taboo” photographs.
Co-curator Andy Wallace also offers a critical view of what constitutes the erotic. Wallace’s creepy kiddy photographs take baby dolls and contort them into lewd, pornographic poses, legs spread, butt cracks revealed. Wallace’s darkly comical body of work taps into the element of kitsch and ick in our cultural eroticization of children.
The notion of Eden was sullied long ago. But work like Bai, Wallace and Witherspoon’s suggests that every day we go a little further in our human obsession with wanting to know more, wanting to see more — at our own expense. Knowing more may mean that things will look far less idyllic, as Adam and Eden also discovered.