Review: 'The 2011 RISCA Fellowship Exhibition'

By GREG COOK | February 10, 2011

STILL LIFE A detail from Crayhon's Thoughts On Romance From the Road series.

Victoria Crayhon's Thoughts On Romance From the Road series documents in large color photos the odd, melancholy, poetic texts she posts on commercial signs and theater marquees. "Slowly dissolving guarantee of infinite day to day thrills" decorates the Greenwich Odeum; elsewhere she muses: "No beginning or end that you're aware of."

Xander Marro's From Diorama Pyramid is a house-shaped box decorated with what could be a psychedelic TV test pattern. Peek in a hole in the center and you see an orange wooden snake doll seated at a table with an empty plate and two soda cans in a room with wild wallpaper and furry carpet. A gray snake departs to the right. Press a button on the front, and a song plays: "Digest! I think it best not at this moment to have a rotting rodent in your belly for long." The diorama isn't as large and ambitious as the wall relief she showed in the DeCordova Museum "Biennial" last winter, but it has the curious charm of a children's television puppet show with a Darwinian law of the jungle edge.

Natalja Kent's Reaction Out of Space photos show naked people seemingly leaping into a black void and vomiting (they may just be spitting milk, or something). Mostly the images come across as knucklehead grossout jokes, but you have to respect how they seem to epitomize both thrilling exuberant abandon and nihilistic, self-indulgent partying.

Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.

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Topics: Museum And Gallery , Museums, DeCordova Museum, Erik Carlson, More

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