ArtUS 8 May . June 2005
School
33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD January
15 – February 10, 2005
Denise Tassin uses sculpture, installation, and an assortment
of drawings to conjure a “loser-ly” but ultimate
perceptive personal stance. Tassin’s work
is not at all self-conscious and operates without aesthetic
gimmickry. There are dramatic shifts between media
and affects, which at times appear grand and, at others,
completely impulsive. Similar to artists like Sean
Landers, hers is a jarringly intimate and sometimes confessional
engagement with art-making that does not require a set
of technical parameters, being less a singular undertaking
than a series of loosely connected projects. Like
Landers, too, Tassin makes art within a genre already
over-saturated with the oppressed, depressed, and repressed – where
the art of self-loathing reads as a compulsion to repeat. At
some point it seems that nearly every artist discovers
a mystical land filled with neurotic possibility – a
land long ago discovered, settled, and abandoned by others. In
this way, “loser art” has become a kind of
art-school colonial enterprise that colors everything
with the willfully morose.
Tassin’s work borders on but never quite enters this
territory. Its head y quality is offset by subtle
drawings consisting of clean, elegant lines with a highly
inventive twist. In a series of small drawings produced
by machines (absent from the show), Tassin creates soft
graphite auroras as though out of luminous cosmic gas. These
drawings appear alongside others drawn with a Sharpie held
in Tassin’s mouth. This series of “mouth
drawings” contains phrases that, in Tassin’s
own words, are difficult (or uncomfortable) to articulate. The
shaky scrawl in Stay Away from My Stuff (all works
2004) and You Are a Very Mean Person is barely
legible, yet remains strangely poignant. In Mirror
Image of Self, Tassin uses her ubiquitous Sharpie
to produce a large self-portrait wherein the lines of her
face appear intentionally distorted. This drawing,
like a number of others here, conveys a kind of sad acceptance
of one’s physicality, but of a corpus drawn from
imagination or sheer anxiety. Scotsman,
the largest and perhaps the most interesting drawing in
the show, contains a series of colored marker splotches
resembling the weave of a latch-hook stitch, all radiating
a crafty, almost geriatric ethos. Scotsman and Forest
Aglow, a thrift-store-esque country landscape riven
with pink glowing trees, both evoke an uncanny feeling,
like that of having spent a psychedelic weekend at grandma’s
house. A whiff of nostalgia imbues Tassin’s
work, but it packs a skewed or even alien stench. Through
intimate drawings and random objects, Tassin re-creates
her unique cosmology out of the disparate pieces of others. |
