Event

The DissemblistsPost an Event »

Little Tree Gallery

November 15 - December 21, 2008

Info

3412 22nd Street San Francisco, CA 94110
Google Map »
The Dissemblists
OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, November 15th, 6-9pm The Dissemblists: Callyann Casteel Maeghan Reid Lyla Rose Assembled by Andrew Berardini dis·sem·ble /d__s_mb_l/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation [di-sem-buhl] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, -bled, -bling. –verb (used with object) 1. to give a false or misleading appearance to; conceal the truth or real nature of: to dissemble one's incompetence in business. 2. to put on the appearance of; feign: to dissemble innocence. 3. Obsolete. to let pass unnoticed; ignore. –verb (used without object) 4. to conceal one's true motives, thoughts, etc., by some pretense; speak or act hypocritically. To be a dissembler or worse a dissemblist, seems to have the same connotations as being a con-artist, a fraud, a liar. It has the same root as dissimulate, which can be easily interpreted to fake the symptoms of a real disease. But if we dig back to the theoretical bugbear and trickster (perhaps even a dissemblist himself), Jean Baudrillard, it’s impossible to simulate the symptoms of a disease, the simulation if done well, becomes the disease. Or if we talk about another trickster, this one in American letters, Kurt Vonnegut, the moral of his WWII novel Mother Night, is the only moral he could spell out for his readers: “We are what we pretend to be.” To title a show, “The Dissemblists” may be read as a kind of an insult, a backhanded compliment to invite artists into an exhibition and call them not artists, but con-artists. Though an artist is always a dissemblist of a kind, casting glamours over paint and canvas, bronze and stone, space and time, urinals and bicycle wheels, and calling it art, this particular casts of artists assembled here are not just dissemblers but Dissemblists, a movement that only recently came into existence and which I’ve made up. I group these artists together not just cause the share some sense of space in Southern California (all of them at one point or another in the near or distant past and future have called Los Angeles and its environs home), but because through their work they create and pull stories out of things, rife with inexplicable drama, hiding the nature of the things themselves through the essence of the assembled elements. I came across the word in relation to assembly, as all of them put things, disparate parts and motions, together, but went beyond the once radical word now standard jargon of assemblage. They were all doing something much more perilous. They pull together the handmade, the broken, and the found to create narratives, sometimes obfuscated and personal, other times absurd and farflung. A radical sensibility and a political gesture whose only dogma is ambiguity. Callyann Casteel’s costumes and installations create monumental characters whose visual language can be superficially read as darling or twee, but when peeled back reveals strange, dark stories of alienation, bondage, destitution, and horror. Maeghan Reid’s expanded field wall works, assemble and dissemble stories and landscapes, pulled mysteriously from midstream, from the structure of an imaginary we’ve only to guess at, each piece a chapter from an encyclopedia of her practice. Lyla Rose’s collages and assemblages bring together the found and the abandoned, using an imagery like a wunderkammerer fistfighting a revolutionary image archive, the resulting aftermath are visual stories, like a Robbe-Grillet book, ripe with narrative possibilities but never explicated to give us the false satisfaction of knowing, anything, for sure. Here are a few Dissemblists concealing their true motives with objects and gestures under the malleable and protean disguise of “art.”