Cover Story: Party People
Cheese Doodles and desire at Fay Gold Gallery
Terry Rodgers' work will either turn you on or convince you that Americans are headed down a bad, bad road.
His latest paintings, currently on view at Fay Gold Gallery, are the kind of orgiastic scenes that porn fans dream about and moralists fear. The paintings feature upper-middle-class men and women with the blank expressions of sex automatons.
His Atlanta dealer, Fay Gold, says it's generally men who go for Rodgers' paintings. "The guys say, 'I want to get invited to that party.'"
According to a recent article in ARTnews, the demand for Rodgers' work remains steady, with his prices more than tripling in the past five years.
Rodgers' paintings center on parties in expensively decorated, luxurious settings filled with people who disrobe or gaze distractedly into space, and no one's gaze actually meets. The decadent ambiance of nipple piercings, bare breasts, fashion, alcohol, voyeurism and exhibitionism give Rodgers' latest batch of paintings the flavor of the fall of the Roman empire-meets-reality TV.
These are people who have gorged so long on sex and excess that they have lost their taste for life and are engaged in the kind of "fun" that comes with a fair amount of psycho-sexual baggage. In many ways, the paintings evoke glossy pornography. But porn tends to deliver and Rodgers' scenes hang in an expectant perpetuity, promising something about to happen - the frustration of desires unmet and wants unanswered that defines his work.
Defined by a "drive for some type of connection" in Rodgers' latest works, that desire has reached a fever pitch, and the introduction of explicit sexuality adds a new level of anxiety and menace to already troubling material.
"I'm giving a portrait of us," Rodgers says. "I'm interested in the dilemma of what it is to be a human being."
Fay Gold's pairing of Rodgers and sculptor and photographer Sandy Skoglund seems apropos. Both depict elaborate party scenes crafted more from their imagination than any locatable reality.
Rodgers takes photographs of friends and strangers and then blends them together in imagined party scenes. Skoglund creates fantastic tableaux, half-pop art, half-surrealist, where ordinary cocktail parties and backyard barbecues take on a "Twilight Zone" dimension. In "Raining Popcorn," a group of people - some covered entirely in popcorn - gather around a fire in a Jiffy Pop landscape. Defamiliarizing ordinary materials, Skoglund's work reacquaints us with our physical reality.
For her Fay Gold exhibition, Skoglund re-created the set for her 1992 photograph "The Cocktail Party" in a section of the gallery where every available surface is covered with Cheese Doodles.
As with her other photographic landscapes, featuring eggs, popcorn, raisins and jellybeans, Skoglund spends the bulk of her artmaking time on research and development. For instance, she figures out just how she can fortify a notoriously degradable puffed corn snack into rock-hard tubers able to sustain much manhandling. The Doodles were rendered workable by both soaking and painting them with epoxy. Skoglund keeps a little cup of the newly scrappy Doodles in a cup to replenish anything that falls off in transit.
Skoglund considered Doritos and potato chips for "The Cocktail Party" but settled on Cheese Doodles because they were "so screamingly unnatural," she says.
Perhaps in that regard, the Doodles better echo the odd, artificial human ritual of the cocktail party. Though separated in their distinct embrace of doom and whimsy, Rodgers and Skoglund share a marveling detachment from the strange rituals of our lives.
Skoglund's people are surrounded by snack food, and in Rodgers' paintings, they seem to willingly make themselves into disposable, tasty morsels.
"I think of the human being as the unnatural animal," says Skoglund, whose work resonates with that tension between a fiction of human control and a world gone wild.
IT'S A SAD DAY FOR ATLANTA when someone as talented as Helena Reckitt bids the city adieu. Reckitt has served as senior director of exhibitions and education at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center since 2002 and the education director since 1998. British-born Reckitt came to Atlanta from London's Institute of Contemporary Art. During her tenure, she weathered the Contemporary's financial difficulties, brought in a raft of nationally and internationally known artists like Pierre Huyghe, Hew Locke, Jeff Sonhouse and Annika von Hausswolff, and edited a highly regarded book, Art and Feminism, by London-based Phaidon Press.In August, Reckitt relocates to Toronto to join her new husband, former Art Papers editor Charles Reeve, who took a teaching and curatorial position at the Ontario College of Art and Design. The couple married May 14.
Reckitt's roster of scheduled shows will continue at the Contemporary through summer 2006. A national search is underway to find a successor.