So, What Have You Been Up To?

by Tucker Neel

catalog essay for Flash Forward at The Campbell Hall Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, 2014

High School reunions are fascinating and kind of terrifying. These ritualized events punctuating American adulthood act as regressive time machines allowing one to return both physically and psychologically to an adolescent past. They hold the nostalgic promise of recreated memory and the elusive possibility to re-imagine what once was. At a reunion memories of the past can reveal themselves as quite unreliable because reminiscences are always fugitive, always retooling themselves to fit with an everchanging sense of self. This is why some people find themselves selectively recreating life stories or, in a Lacanian confabulation, making up outright lies when confronted wither their past. Remember Romy and Michelle saying they invented Post-its? As anyone who’s been to one knows, a reunion is often a treacherous exercise, filled with all the could-have-beens and buried hatchets unearthed and re-sharpened over too many gin and tonics. After a reunion one is left to wonder if we ever leave high school, or if we carry it with us, bearing its shape-shifting imprint forever.

Here in this gallery we have a small reunion of sorts, comprised of four Campbell Hall alumni: Lola Thompson ‘04, Gabrielle Ferrer ‘01, Katie Kline ‘01, and Ben Bigelow ‘04. Joined together by the graduation dates that will always follow their names in future school publications, these emerging artists present recent work in this newly minted gallery on a recently renovated campus. The inescapable frame of reference uniting these artists is indeed their position as subjects birthed from the very institution that houses their work-if only for the time being. One can expect this selection of artists can’t help but speak a shared language. If the works here could talk, they would probably speak of a shared productive anxiety that attends the life of an emerging artist. As you walk around in this space, imagine how the conversation unfolds. Although the works in this gallery utilize disparate media to create heterogeneous forms, they seem to me to attest to an overarching skeptical relationship to control, communication, and narrative. But remember, this is not just a reunion, it’s a testament to four devoted and emergent art practices that just happen to trace back to a common educational institution.

Many of the works in Fast Forward explore how we “read” images for underlying meaning.  This is no better articulated than in Lola Thompson’s work. Thompson uses her paintings to re-imagine history or re-inscribe the present with a self-aware ridiculousness. If you’re wondering, the artist is totally in on the joke. Her paintings employ an immediately understandable form of representational illustration, often using simple outlines placed on the canvas as if traced from existing images. Painted with confident one-off brushstrokes in pure pigment colors, these images spring forth with spontaneity as if they were created minutes ago. Yet the works cannot be understood without their elaborate corresponding titles, which produce an almost didactic interplay between text and image. Titles like Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoy demonstrate how to really bro down and Herm of Hermes Divining Locations Of Future Drone Strikes construct strange historical pairings in viewers’ minds alluding to absurd scenarios rich with contemporary urgency. In the tried and true Dada retooling of viewership, the audience “completes” Thompson’s work when they wrestle with what they see and what they are told to see. The story and image are nothing without the viewer. I would argue that this imagined and un-representable narrative in the viewer’s head is the actual subject in Thompson’s work.

Like the impossible stories in Thompson’s images, Gabrielle Ferrer’s work also references the unspeakable and unknowable space in between language and its pictorial representation. At first glance, Ferrer’s collections of bits of wire may seem inconsequential. However, these quirky lines reference symbols taken from the Lexicon of Comicana by Mort Walker, a book categorizing the symbols used in comic book illustrations to signify everything from curse words to the navigational route of a fly. Ferrer displays typologies of these line drawings referencing extrasensory information. The wire work on display also catalogs the line drawings that stand for movement around characters and the air they pass through and activate, which must be referenced in a comic strip in order to convey action, narrative, and humor. Ferrer’s curly Squeans imply intoxication. Her Swaloops indicate movement in a circular motion, like a golf swing or a spinning top. It’s no coincidence that these squeans, swaloops and spurls accompany unpleasant or out of control bodies in motion (spinning, fainting, inebriated, etc.), states one would find hard to articulate fully in words. It’s easier to convey these phenomena diagrammatically, even though as one knows, squiggly lines don’t actually appear above a drunk’s head. In literalizing these diagrams of movement and physical states, Ferrer’s work asks us to think about the limits of representation and how information is transmitted through extratextual means. Taking this into consideration these groupings read as a typology of experiences where description fails.

If Ferrer’s work touches on the inability of embodied reality to be represented with language, then Ben Bigelow’s video, The Grid, creates a similar critique of the limits of control and order. In The Grid stable objects, language, and systems of representation are always in flux. Bigelow eschews standard narrative in favor of isolated vignettes and an accumulation of scenes that always seem to portend impending discombobulation. The work, and its attendant title, point to the importance of the grid, a good ol’ staple of Cartesian rationalism allowing one to organize and observe facts against a plane of scientific order. But in Bigelow’s world this order always teeters on the precipice of destruction. The video is filled with arranged scenes that look out of control: a wildly spinning plate, a scattered mess of lined notebook paper, jumbles of numbers or unintelligible assemblies of letters. Each of these scenarios resolves itself back into a state of order and legibility, usually with the help of an omnipotent hand just off-screen, which swipes, grabs, and compresses unwieldy objects like a user would interact with a touch screen tablet. In this digital world entropy and disorder are refigured and made to behave. But in the end real control is unattainable. In one shot a pulsating burst of color gradients seems to suck in an almost indecipherable mass of letters reading, “TAKE CONTROL.” Yet the arrangement of letters and the way their rapidity and brevity deny legibility ironically implies that such a statement is impossible. Control is implied in Bigelow’s work only to be dismantled when the camera cuts away. Each scene gives way to another out of control situation, as if the process were destined to repeat itself again and again (the video is, after all, on loop).


Katie Kline’s images also evoke a distrust of narrative, resolution, and the expectations that come with representation. At first glance her images frustrate with their familiarity and surface banality. Kline’s photographs read as passing glances or frames taken in-between more dramatic shots. One finds that Kline’s photos often imply hidden action lurking just out of sight. In Spill a feathery coagulation of paint occupies the corner between a sidewalk and a stark white wall like a truncated acrylic estuary, a record of out-of-control action cut off by routine property maintenance. In Frame a pink square painted on a brick wall becomes a monochromatic backdrop awaiting a passing subject who never comes. In light of the ubiquity of picture sharing platforms like Instagram and Facebook, one might want to dismiss Kline’s work as circumstantially fortuitous, as if she were stumbling around, camera in hand. This would be a mistake. While her photographic practice does indeed implicitly reference a fascination with infinite personal documentation, a voracious way of owning the fugitive world one inhabits, Kline’s work really is about photography. Her images sit comfortably in an art historical trajectory stretching from Cartier-Bresson to William Eggleston, to Wolfgang Tillmans. Like these photographers before her, Kline proposes a surprising and engrossing way of looking for hidden treasures in daily life, using framing and light to focus attention on what might otherwise be overlooked.

Two of the artists in this show will probably return for their approaching ten-year reunion in 2014. The other two artists will have their fifteen-year reunion in 2016. In light of this exhibition, it’s worth wondering what these milestones will bring. One could easily say that any high school reunion is a leap (or a return?) into a psychic breach filled with suspect appearances, where the veracity of shared experiences and their representations are thrown into question. In this way the work in Fast Forward seems quite appropriate for what lies ahead. As the work in the gallery attests, what we see may not be what really exists and what we say may never approximate reality. Like the nervous conversations at an awkward high school reunion, our understanding of our positions in the present are always conditionally dependent on a framing and reframing of the past, which is always slipping away and changing into something else once it is remembered.