Spencer Longo at King’s Leap

Artist: Spencer Longo

Exhibition title: Shock Site

Venue: King’s Leap, New York, US

Date: October 25 – November 24, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and King’s Leap, New York

King’s Leap is pleased to present Shock Site, an exhibition of new work by Spencer Longo. The drawing, sculpture, and collage assembled here address screen-mediated violence, virality, and the physical conditions of viewing. The title of the show refers both to the webpages that infamously host gore, coprophilia, and pornographic novelties, and an attempt to locate the experience of viewing distressing material somewhere between the screen and the regulatory systems of the human body.

From within a collage on aluminum panels, two boys stare out from the mirrored packaging of a budget consumer television. They are the Dnipropetrovsk Maniacs, two Ukranians convicted of carrying out a vicious and random 21-victim killing spree in 2007. The pair’s trial garnered extra media attention due to the prosecution’s claim that they made videos of these acts to sell to a wealthy foreign website operator that had supposedly ordered forty snuff films. One of these videos eventually did make it to the web, making the rounds on LiveLeak, torrents, and snuff/gore web backchannels. Alongside this image, concept art for battle-royale video game characters, fantasy illustrations, the packaging of ready-to-maim fireworks, and the poster for the Shia LeBeouf-led tale of murder-next-door Disturbia adorn the surface of the TV box in a dense collage towards a pop-imaginary of witnessed-violence. Here Longo has assembled a delicate calculus where mediated-cruelty and bodily extremism stand in for extremism at large.

The show’s eponymous sculpture, Shock Site (Haptic Ass Rig), combines the literal seat where one might sit at their computer and encounter online snuff with guts and lengths of intestinal tract rendered with a high degree of anatomical precision, using practical special effects techniques and materials sourced from Hollywood prop-supply stores. Taken together, two sites emerge for the impression and resonance of gory viscera: both the screen and the flows of images sloshing within it, as well as the entrails and vital organs of the human body that become surfaces for a physical empathetic response from the viewer.

After all, guts, like screens, come replete with their own cultures: bacteria and sensory equipment that regulate physical and emotional responses to a variety of stimuli. This thread is taken up in a pair of drawings, dendritic, pro-complexity forms that reference the structure of neurons and nerves, the material components that process and transmit our frame for reality. These tuberous, rhizomatic paths of inquiry create a dense unified field where disparate forces, like biological hazards and rapidly-growing living systems, can be at once at odds, yet intertwined.

Spencer Longo (b. 1986) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, PA. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Brand New Gallery, Milan; Levy.Delval, Brussels; Smart Objects, and Garden, Los Angeles, CA; and as an artist in residence at Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, CA. He was a member of the artist collective JOGGING and showed work together at Still House, New York, NY and on MOCA TV. Recent group exhibitions include Garden, Los Angeles, CA; LOYAL, Stockholm; Future Gallery, Berlin; Chez Valentin, Paris; Carl Kostyal, London; Perry Rubenstein, Los Angeles, CA; and Edouard Malingue Gallery.