2nd floor projects presents Collage, Mash-ups, and Collapsed Time
Thematically related source material from artists Matt Borruso, Luke Butler, Evan Ellsworth Jourden, Amanda Kirkhuff, George and Mike Kuchar, M, Wayne Smith, and Jane “in vain” Winkelman that reference and borrow imagery from film stills, vintage magazines, advertisements, comic books, and pop culture icons to media reports, streaming together narratives that formulate alternative universes. These drawings, paintings, and collage works translate and enable a kind of grotesque or transitional space that may destabilize the viewer into the “betwixt and between” psychological.
The following text was written on the occasion of the exhibition, Return To Holy Mountain—Matt Borruso at 2nd floor projects, San Francisco, 11 April–17 May 2009.
If you have queries about any of the images you see in this show, please write Margaret at: 2ndfloorprojects@earthlink.net
—Margaret Tedesco
Postapocallipses by Matt Sussman
The camera zooms out slowly to show that I’m the last man on Earth. Actually, I’m having cocktails with friends I stole from the department store. The city is a veldt in which all the metaphors have been poached. Watch me perform a trick shot in which doves fly from my open wounds, white darts from a magician’s coat. The animals had to be borrowed surreptitiously, because nothing conveys the dark night of sense and desire like a lone camel. The waiter cuts into my neck and extracts a cancerous squid simmered in indigo. Voila! Dinner is served. Anyone can turn shit into gold—I saw the infomercial. I’ve been feeling under my couch cushions for spare enlightenment. The only loose piece here is that lesbian arms tycoon. They say the race problem has been solved now that everyone is albino. So why is the last woman on Earth a sistah? I’ve never slept with anyone before who had a pierced peradam. What a lovely interior. Did the atrium come with the fistula? You’re a little woo-woo, but one month with no vandalism is nothing to turn a blinded eye to. Give me your palmistry and I’ll read your card catalog. I say this from the very bottom of my world-weariness: It is by the straight-faced linesmen and the bloodied citizenry that the first and most simple example and representation of all things may be demoralized. Oh God, how profound are these mysteries! Check please. The dwarf maître d’ informs us your money has no value.
INT, Bedroom: Sun streams across our faces, the sheets keep my modesty in check. Our semen has dried into a fine breadcrumb trail between my Anahata and Manipura chakras. Real life awaits us, you inform me as you light another Parliament. What a fucking cop-out.
