Castellanos's title is as involving, as exuberant and as exhausting as his exhibition: To Drive The Nail of Terror Into The Hearts of The Backsliding Sinners. The show is divided, Castellanos points out, into "cantos." The first one, the fire-and-brimstone works of the title, which draw their inspiration from the blood-and-thunder harangues of great 18th-century American clerics such as Jonathan Edwards, is Castellanos's harvesting of stills from some 8mm porno films he found and subsequently wrestled into gloriously intense photo images, six feet by four feet - which also appear, at this new monumental scale, to have something to do with Michelangelo's Last Judgment murals in the Sistine Chapel.
Canto 2, Demon Seed, is a wall of corroded and mildewed lithographs from the venerable Dick and Jane public-school primers of the 1930s that taught so many kids to read (Look Jane! See Spot run!!). Castellanos found the pages on the street and now, recontextualized by the gallery's walls, they seem archaic, ineffectual and - worse - hypocritical and unrealistic.
Canto 3 is The Sybil Pictures - compellingly raucous ink drawings on wallpaper, the images (scissors, broken unspinnable tops, staring disembodied eyes), all of it derived from "the many personalities of Sybil Dorsett, the world's most famous psychiatric patient." The pictures, as Castellanos so dramatically puts it, "are a window into our culture's psyche." I don't know if I'd go that far - but they are grabby and hard to shake off.
about the exhibition
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Akimblog
Stories, In Pieces at Justina M. Barnicke Gallery | Tim Whiten at Olga Korper Gallery | Ted Tucker and Rory Dean at Christopher Cutts Gallery | Ulysses Castellanos and Gareth Lichty at Peak Gallery
posted by Terence Dick - July 31st, 2008.
There’s a different type of darkside on display over at Peak Gallery. Ulysses Castellanos has more of a Kenneth Anger-vibe going on. His size-large stills from an old super 8 porno are too obvious for me (sacred vs profane, you know the deal), but his so-called Sybil Pictures (cartoonish doodles on scraps of ugly wallpaper) and his reprints of an old children’s book are less explicable and therefore more interesting. The source of these images is uncertain and their combination of innocence and experience give them a sense of grim import.
Terence Dick |
