Artist: Sam Davis
Exhibition title: 0.5 MOMMY MAN
Venue: Topless, Rockaway Beach, New York, US
Date: June 13 – 28, 2015
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Topless, New York
1. The Mommy Man Antaeus is the “half-giant” son of Poseidon and Poseidon’s grandmother, Gaia.
2. Poseidon, characteristic of contemporaneous deities, does not stick around to raise his son.
3. As the earth itself, Gaia inevitably “sticks around.”
4. The Mommy Man Antaeus possesses a near-limitless power of strength and regeneration as long as he remains in contact with his mother, the earth.
5. The Mommy Man Antaeus does not possess the ability to fly and is, therefore, usually in contact with his mother, the earth.
6. The Mommy Man Antaeus has a single task: to build a temple to his father out of human skulls. All other tasks can be considered subordinate to this task.
7. Skulls are collected by means of wrestling matches with passersby.
Despite popular depictions indicating a more recognizable human anatomy, the Mommy Man Antaeus appears as a large human right foot terminating, at the high ankle, in a human head. Tibia and fibula are fused into a single tapering lumbar femur, some sort of heel/coccyx hybrid. The vertebral path goes straight from cervical to a big skull sitting on top of an achilles spine. He has no arms, no legs, no chest, no nipples, no visible stomach, no ass, etc., to speak of. His bald head is lightly and permanently sunburned, ringed by greasy flaxen hair, worn long and never cut. He imagines he thinks so hard that it pushes the hair out of his head, his first thoughts stored in the frayed tips, recent thoughts closer to the skull. Hair lost to balding results in incomplete data.
He has not been able to find his palace of skulls for as long as he can remember. Furthermore, there hasn’t been anyone to wrestle. Or anyone at all, for that matter. Bone fragments nestle in the immodestly green grass at regular intervals. Each blade is the same length and the rolling hills they cover are identical and evenly spaced. He thinks of the landscape as reiterative and insistent, in his best and only dream.
Special guest appearances by Matteo di Giovanni, Orion Martin, Marisa Takal, and memory of Nick Bastis.
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Mommy Man, 2015
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Special Table, 2015