The Autotopographers on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center through Sept. 15, 2019.
The current exhibit “Mise-en-Scène” at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center is a series of four shows (multiple end dates) within a single show bringing together artists who approach art as a visual stage. It’s a potentially fruitful metaphorical conceit for a visual art exhibition that demonstrates the power to provide a tidy, extra-dimensional, metaphorical platform to play out visual intent, but it’s not without limitations.
The four individual exhibitions at the Kohler apply the stage metaphor in a variety of ways; some more on-point than others. In “Visual Reality Outpost,” artist Saya Woolfalk reimagines the art gallery as a day spa, encouraging mindfulness and mental centeredness. Trippy violet walls are covered with teeming configurations of repeating shapes, mandalas and mysterious, backlit images and figures. The peaceful and meditative setting encourages a shared interactive equanimity; a stage of visual and mental wellness, perhaps.
Mark Baum’s paintings in the show, “Collective Consciousness,” emerge from a coded vocabulary of personally significant marks, often made against darkened backgrounds. Like Woolfalk’s installation, his idiosyncratic figures often feel lit from behind, though his appear like 8-bit Atari figures more than meditative invitations. The metaphor of a stage in his case might make less sense than one of a set of rectilinear video game consoles playing out the sequences of an esoteric personal cosmology.
The exhibition in the main gallery space titled “Autotopographers” is derived from a term coined by art historian Jennifer A. González referring to how biographical material functions as a physical index of life; a deposited “topography” of individual existence. We see the personal “topographies” of 10 artists in enthusiastic variety—from Beatriz Cortez’s sheet metal and stone in “Lakota Porch,” to Yoshi Sakai’s soap opera-based funhouse in “Koko’s Love.”
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But every one of the individual installations, too, bears its own rich supply of random personal elements, splurges of color and ephemeral jangle. The delightful assortment of effects feels purposeful and composed more than poured out and deposited, though. Each wonderful work reads like an individually arranged curiosity-cabinet more than they do a pile of dirty, random, psychic laundry; more stagecraft than sediment, which might be OK after all, given the show’s objective.
Scott Reeder’s contribution to the “Mise-en-Scène” fits the show’s bill perfectly. “B-Side of the Moon” is, in fact, an installation comprised of portions of the set he used for his feature length film, Moon Dust. The contiguous monochromatic environments in “Moon World”—including the sherbet-colored “Five Seasons Lounge” and bright red control room—will obviously make more sense to those who have seen or are aware of the film, but the actual movie is so driven by its set design that interacting with it and viewing it are fairly similar experiences. Moon Dust as a film feels kind of like an improvised reenactment of a futuristic version of “The Love Boat” if executed by Pee-wee Herman, Ellsworth Kelly and Stanley Kubrick—which pretty much describes Reeder’s consciousness. The movie always seems on the verge of veering off either into the realm of soft-core porn or a PBS kids’ show at any moment. Given its slack, surreal, funny and slightly juvenile sensibilities, the work provides an appropriate setting for viewers (especially children) to play out their own improvised narrative fantasies. I wasn’t the only parent who exited “B-Side” with an iPhone film starring their own kids.
To think of an art practice as a performative extension is a fertile context for work to grow in meaning and association. But it also suggests theatricality and artifice—terms that have been artistic Kryptonite for the past century. The stage is also a concept just as likely to be watered down as poisonous: Any keyhole can be a proscenium; any barrier a fourth wall; any physical or psychic enclosure a theater of alternative reality. Basically, all the world’s a metaphorical stage if one has the visual-rhetorical skills. “Mise-en-Scène” throws a lot of art against the stage walls, hitting it most of the time, and lands a curatorial bullseye with “B-Side of the Moon.”
