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hears you asking for more.
T R A C Y A BE L N
C O U R T E S Y O F P L U G P R O J E C TS
IS THAT ALL?
At Plug Projects, Brandon Juhasz
A
melancholy sigh for the usual: It’s OK to be average. There is, after all, only so much room at the top of the doughnut pyramid. Wait, doughnuts? Yes. Artist Brandon Juhasz has set a pyramidal stack of pink-frosted doughnuts on a low pedestal made to suggest imitation marble. It’s a meeting of desire and mediocrity, a sure lure for Homer Simpson, an expression of the social pyramid that seems to whisper, Don’t beat yourself up if you’re in the supporting majority underneath. The folks and figures in Juhasz’s I Can’t Promise to Try are here, in all their glossy, colorful glory, to help. Glossy, colorful — and made of folded paper. With this latest exhibition at Plug Projects, Kansas City once again benefits from the connections of the gallery’s curatorial crew, who routinely introduce us to bright, new work from artists such as Cleveland’s Juhasz — here presenting his 3-D works in an exhibition for the first time. It’s a privilege to see Juhasz at what appears to be a turning point. In keeping with this conceptually well-executed array, he’s also about to debut a response to Édouard Manet’s 1863 “Lunch on the Grass.” His “Paradise. Pair a dice,” which opens August 23 at Cleveland’s oldest nonprofit gallery (SPACES), is a roomlike tableau that expands on what’s consid-
“Followers” (left) and “Mountain Man”
hunks of meat, the human form — are familered ideal or desirable and casts a conscious iar and simple. But in Juhasz’s dioramas, in eye on the awkwardness of sexuality in an era person, they take on an eerie personality. of constant social interaction. Photography, Juhasz says, amounts to Juhasz used to do a lot of portrait paintour ultimate death mask: images we hold ing and landscape photography but hit his creative stride when he started exploring on to long after their moments have passed, the pursuit of the ideal: the mundane nature sometimes long after any relevance remains. He enjoys making something that can fool of existence and our desire for the elusive us into accepting it as “real” — real enough something more. His technique — building obto take for granted. jects and scenes by folding “How Embarrassing” photographs appropriated I Can’t Promise to Try is one of Juhasz’s paper from open-source images Through September 7 people, lying pathetically (thanks, bountiful Internet) at Plug Projects, 1613 on the f loor. This poor — emerged as a response to Genessee, 646-535-7584, fellow has reason to feel America’s homemaking plugprojects.com self-conscious, naked and standard-bearer. crushable as he is. With “I love Martha Stewart closed eyes and one-ply feet that flop weakly [Living] magazine, the art in it,” he tells me. “The photography is great, especially the older from cylindrical legs, the smaller-thanones. Everything is done with such care. And life form is reminiscent of a diminished, they make it look like real life, make it look shriveled mummy. It’s the epitome of “Is this all there is?” like it’s achievable. But it’s not achievable!” Juhasz says he was delighted at the way Replicating those photos led to making “How Embarrassing” worked in the gallery things out of the pictures, which in turn led to the more developed narratives on during the opening. Everyone was just standing around it, going about the business of view at Plug: eight inkjet prints, arranged salon-style along one wall, and seven three- socializing, oblivious to it. You might also breeze past “Limp Wood” dimensional constructs neatly spaced on — directly across the space from “How the other walls or arranged on pedestals. In Embarrassing” — without a lot of thought print and laid out flat or viewed on a screen, the items he chooses — a pepperoni pizza, beyond its implied double-entendre. But
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the artist thinks of it as a statement about strength as well as a play on the idea of functionality. The piece drapes one (fake, paper, wood-grained photo) 2-by-4 surrealistically over another jutting straight out from the wall, showing the exasperation of powerlessness. We all can share the feeling of “I can’t do my job anymore.” It’s disconcerting to stare into the pastedon eyes of “Mountain Man.” They’re buggy and spaced widely, and they seem unable to focus on anything as they stare out from a head and an armless torso. This guy, dressed in intentionally cliché plaid, his face made of the crags and snow of a “real” mountain, droops a bit, and not just because a crown of lamb chops weighs him down. He, too, seems to want more out of life. Anyone with a fear of puppets or cadavers will feel uneasy among Juhasz’s people. A creepy intimacy throbs from the figures’ details, the high-resolution body hair and moles. And even if Juhasz hadn’t admitted that nipples imply to him the uselessness and burden of people needing things from one another, there would be a charged and attractive discomfort in seeing so many of them cut out and stuck back on. If there’s a weakness here, it’s that lumber, meat piles and men in underwear don’t immediately speak to female sensibilities, at least not directly. But regardless of your gender, if you stand among these images long enough, an odd melancholy seeps in.
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