Artists: David Cordero, Chelsea Culp, Stevie Hanley, Isabella Kendrick
Exhibition title: re: a memo to peregrine staff
Venue: Lodos, Mexico City
Date: March 27 – April 25, 2015
Photography: Images courtesy of the artists and Lodos
Frankenstein’s wretch read The Sorrows of Young Werther during his exile in the woods, and miserably, correctly, identified with its tragic protagonist. That the currents of romance and horror run directly alongside one another is not a radical realization, but we don’t often image the monster holding a novel. When Horace warned of purple patches in poetry, and later when the lavender scare had the United States in a tizzy, what we were cautioned against was the flamboyant body and all of its coded extravagances and spills.
Someone recently told me a remarkable, albeit unrepeatable, story about rupturing pipes, a shit waterfall, and paintings in a Chelsea gallery that ended with the teller’s adamant declaration that “the body is back.” A couple weeks later I was power spraying human waste, sun-congealed and stubborn, off the back step of a nonprofit in Chicago, and I had to agree. Fabulous, cuckold, salacious, exuberant, and dismembered indeed, “the body is back.”
Chelsea Culp, Moolah Bandah> secret garden> Master Key, 2014
David Cordero, Untitled (poster blank), 2015
Isabella Kendrick, Untitled (Shortcut), 2014
Stevie Hanley, Money Orbiting Mars, 2015
Stevie Hanley, Hard Boiled Faberge Egg, 2015
