May 3, 2008
Mongrel operations
Sriwhana Spong, an Auckland, New Zealand artist who has shown extensively in Wellington, Christchurch, Sydney and her home-town, is conversely almost entirely unknown in this country. She is exhibited in this country for the first time at Rotunda, thanks to a four-month residency in New York City awarded by the International Studio and Curatorial Program. Her standing work in this show, Passage (2008), is an installation of carved seedlac forms arranged on a large plywood plank supported by oranges. The connection between the title and the “raft” of plywood is implicit of the artist’s journey to the United States, with her sociocultural luggage aboard; Spong’s ethnic heritage is half-Balinese, half-European. But the work is certainly tricky to read without a bit of backstory; it was thankfully supplemented with Muttnik (2005) (shown in the April 16 video screening; previously at Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland), a fuzzy Super-8 recording (named for the first dog launched into space) of Balinese ceremonial offerings of fruit, incense, Coke bottles and cigarettes, arranged in a lush suburban backyard and set to “Dear Prudence”. A Wonder Years sort of nostalgia is the ruling aesthetic here, but its appeal is skewed; from Spong’s previous statement:
My Muttnik is a mongrel operation, a mish mash, misshapen venture, the creation of a home for strays. It is an education, an exploration into the shadowed parts of my lineage. In Muttnik I skim the surface of Balinese culture, taking what I want and adding to it what I know. This homeland of my father is a glimmer of something fed to me through shadows and whispers, and therefore I must make it my own. By borrowing, stealing and adapting, I can make as many bastards as I want, create as many Muttniks as necessary.
The video gave voice to Passage, tying it in with Spong’s previous body of work, a series of curiously vague vignettes — reaching either into concealed biography or disjointed items of pop culture — working out frustrations of cultural otherness through subtle, visceral gestures.
Elia Alba’s (Dominican-American, based in Queens) artwork contrasts severely; rather than a complex biography, hers is a study of anonymity, of racial avoidance, or rather, a blending of social identities into ugly, confused sign-systems. In Alba’s videos, installations and photographs, real persons or mannequins wear flimsy masks of printed with the faces of others: of a different gender, ethnicity or age. The result is disquieting; sometimes compelling, occasionally terrifying. That’s the gambit. Depersonalized and amplified, Alba’s ethnic nonpersons function as props: either as projections of real persons, or things manipulated to provide displaced human substance to concepts. Her videos apply the latter device, like Unruhe (2001) (shown in the video screening), where Alba’s deflated bag-heads pile on top of each other against a rocky shoreline while an anonymous hand moves them about. An installation in the gallery, Girls (2008), has a starkly different effect; the masks, crudely fit over mannequin heads adorned with cheap, garish wigs, rely on frightening presence rather than concept. In both cases, the work can go between moving and completely unviewable within an instant, which I imagine is Alba’s point. Whatever message that was desired in the first place will still be received, looking at the work, or looking away.
