"Paradox of the Absurd II"


The key is how both artists take this experience of an object’s functionality and incorporate it into their works, altering not only your impression and contact with that object, but the ensuing conflict it raises, once the artist has resurrected the "objet du désir" into something that actually glorifies or subverts it and ultimately renders it useless. Rendering an object useless, if you’re not destroying it, might seem pointless. However, and without getting too pedantic, the role of artists is to provide a certain amount of “meaning” into their works visually and without words. This can be achieved in many ways of which an object can take on metaphorical, even allegorical meaning, alluding to something bigger – idea, concept, thought, emotion, ritual etc. – beyond its physical presence. In this manner, Doore references her reading of David B. Morris’ book entitled Illness and Culture in the Post-modern Age, and his belief that “illness defines who we are.”

“Paradox of the Absurd” is based in part on this concept of illness, an illness not so much physical as it is mental. “The sculptures in ‘Paradox of the Absurd’ are meant to make visible the anxiety and tension experienced in a postmodern capitalist society that is mesmerized by ‘the body without organs’; they are metaphors of unattainable desires,” says Doore. I think Adey would also agree.



"Compulsion I"


Is the transformation of a bottle opener into a grotesque guillotined shell of itself “a metaphor of unattainable desire”? Difficult to tell. However, the mental game of piecing together what a bottle opener looks like, with what you actually see, can be disorienting, gratifying, or extremely banal - depending on your state of mind and level of perception and observation. There is a richness of detail of course, to be witnessed in every one of Doore’s works. Her sculptures might though be easier to grasp literally rather than visually, as the objects are often hidden or protected underneath the object’s surface/texture/skin (take your pick) or “growth” wanting to be caressed but not always touched. In any case, pleasure and pain are never to far away from our fingertips it seems.

There are also several palatable reminders experienced by some as eliciting a negative reaction, a certain "state of not so well being" found in Doore's work like: violence, pain, bondage, loss, dismemberment, and abandonment to name but a few. I believe these are much more easily detected than any signs of illness, anxiety or tension. The visible stitching, the mending of wounds, and the subsequent scarring only heightens the disfigurement of the sculptures. Imagine the work of Japanese photographer Araki and his tightly roped and bound models; remove their heads and a limb or two, and your left with protruding breasts and buttocks. Everything is still there more or less in a Doore sculpture, a heart, a soul, and a vagina, but while your imagination reassembles the rest of the parts, there is no body to recall the ghostly (w)hole. On the other hand, orifices, fabric folds (labia), texture, silky smooth fur, blue veins appearing just below alabaster white stretched fabric (skin), garter belts, bra straps, women's underwear, red lace hidden, revealed, exposed, seduction, foreplay, and eroticism come to mind as well, and fulfils the "positive" and pleasurable emotions of looking at Doore's work. If there is an anxiety to be felt, it is through an endorphin induced remembrance of life’s pain and pleasures.



"Compulsion II"



"Compulsion III"


Doore understands this by walking a very fine line between giving the viewer enough information to draw them in and enough of repugnant charge, albeit quite humorously sometimes to send them back reeling. And while Doore’s sculptures “are bodies without organs” it is difficult to associate illness to inanimate objects such as bottle openers, dish scrubbers, or plastic whisks. They become Surrealist objects that while absurd, do not give enough clues to convince the viewer of some of the real illnesses of a consumer and body conscious society such as anorexia and the intake for example of tobacco, alcohol or any other number of substances, inactivity and poor health (mental or physical) that can possibly lead to cancer. This duality is the strength and weakness of the work. Reminiscent of great works by Eva Hesse, Louise Bourgeois and the sensual forms of Brancusi, consecrated with the rawness of Araki’s photos, it leaves the viewer wanting more or ultimately perplexed. Ambiguity becomes a strength to be further blurred in Doore’s sculptural vocabulary. Don’t underestimate however, a certain level of frustration and denied pleasure that is building from within these pieces, as the pressure pushes against the taunt skin of its host body.



"Quotidian Daydream"



"Quotidian Daydream"


And don't be embarrassed if you're caught looking, its part of Doore's game. Any number of slits, folds, bulges, and mesh covered gashes discovered in the work, is a conscious effort on Doore's part to trigger certain "ancestral" or psychological reaction in the viewer that will undoubtedly elicit a strong emotion. Is it as visceral and graphic as some of the Viennese Actionists performances of the 60's, probably not, however, there’s still a powerful charge to Doore's sculptures. I wonder though, if the work perhaps lacks (certainly not every piece), a more substantive and larger context for it to exist in. Instead of these sculptures resting comfortably on-the-wall or on-the-floor, detached in a visual limbo of sorts and un-threatening, almost apathetic, perhaps they could be pushed into the realm of props, accessories, extensions of the human body which could then act as a foil or backdrop for a range of emotions and concepts, the pieces cannot always vehicule by themselves. In other words, push the work beyond the hijacked stereotypical clues of lace and everything nice, and banal objects, into more pure form or purer seduction – a clearer message. Doore is at her best when subtlety is replaced by directness, anger by fists, sex by fucking, and art filled with passion. It is also what makes it worth experiencing and writing about.



"Dystopia"



"Dystopia" detail






John Luna, artist/writer and Chair of the Slide Room Gallery, also wrote a review of Sandra's exhibit (before mine) that you'll find in its entirety below. Published with permission by John Luna. KF


Review of “Paradox of the Absurd”
by John Luna
(11.21.2008)

La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose.
- Paul Celan

In the corner of the gallery sits a small blue object, like an egg. Its blueness seems concentrated in the white noise of the shabby corner, small and dense, tight and aloof. Looking closer, something protrudes from discreet folds in the split surface: a hand, a cartoonish call for help. It’s a temperature-sensitive gel suspended in puckered plastic, a soother for teething infants. The little fingers seem to invite us into the surface of the sculpture but it’s a pacifier (a “dummy”). Suddenly surrogate, it reorders the terms of the contract: we grip; it becomes part of the mouth.



"Mental Trap"


Sandra Doore’s work depends on equilibrium, of hot and cold or my space and your touch. Compulsion (title of three of the works in this exhibition) is after all a desire to augment and adjust, in the name of achieving the grace of the initial, virgin context: the compulsively cleaned, trimmed, brushed, filed, locked, polished or tied. The Compulsion pieces protrude from the wall in a row, the size of a petite fist or breast, streamlined but soft. Through tubes (the transparent handles of soap-storing scrub-brushes) bra straps wend their way, in weightless, sensual suspirations of corporality and control. Lingerie also fulfills this function on the floor version of Paradox of the Absurd: an ornamental constraint, it can’t commute the mass that extends from it. Like the fluffy synthetic band of Venus in Furs, it invites touch while defining the borderland where surface slips into formlessness, unknowable becoming unthinkable.

What can or can’t be thought of is part of what Paradox provokes. Teething toys, lingerie, kitchen utensils or fold- away furniture, they offer the signifiers of domesticity without the relief of interface, creating a Trap or object lesson out of familiarity. Body image occurs as part-object, from which we cannot possibly assemble a whole, (a sexual organ, a self, a mother, a family household) or a cancerous mass whose growth defies any internal economy. Their rounded edges recall the amphibious lines of contemporary consumer goods from SUV’s to cell phones, designed to insinuate themselves into habits’ niches. Poreless, they seem to emerge from a virtual space, as in the very narrow gap between sorted and unsorted recognition at the mirror, the split-second gap in which we decide whose side we’re on.



"Vanity I"


Beyond provocation and protuberance however, the ungainly balancing act of the pieces, their ultimate co-dependence, wins out. Experienced in the round, the objects become funny as well as unbearably candid, sensible as well as demanding. Their utensil-armatures assert themselves as a structure of foreplay, their cruelty the necessary discipline for a therapeutic confrontation. Over time, it becomes apparent why Doore still considers herself involved in an extension of the dialogues of painting: surfaces and touches that defer and deflect, forms that role-play interchangeable scenarios of illusion and material cause, craft as the desire to arrest a body’s limitless flux, a language that projects its vulnerabilities in order to expose our own.



"Vanity I"



"Paradox of the Absurd I"



"Paradox of the Absurd I"



"Stuck"



"Stuck" detail




And finally, a sneak preview of newer work by Sandra in the "Gifted" exhibit on view at deluge Contemporary Art.



"Consumed I"



"Consumed I"



"Consumed II"



"Consumed II"



"Consumed III"



"Consumed III"