Home / Work: A Psychic Paradigm

by Devin Harclerode

The surrealism of domestic isolation saturates the work of FRC5. By virtue of the pandemic, confined interiors present disembodied realities, alien in their familiarity. The artists of FRC5, communing with our collective present, speculate about power while the world hibernates. Using the home as a nexus, the artists shift the tone of quarantine to relocate perspective and allow for the opening of a psychic space.

When the body is present, it often appears cropped, severed or split - a reminder that singular experiences can be erased in crisis. The title of Aaron Marin’s “I am a Man”, recalls the Memphis sanitation strike of 1968, and in the context of 2020 the labor of the marginalized is still barely compensated.  Marin’s portrait of musician Kevin Abstract is split and doubled calling attention to the objectification of the black male body. In its duplication are artifacts of digitization, reducing clarity to flattened symbols of one’s identity, generalized and exploited for labor power. As digital marks reduce the face to grayscale, we feel the violent erasure of a mediated experience. The severed self is used to subvert norms in Ash Goodwin’s photo “Dollar Shooters”, where two sets of legs become dreamy in an abject inflatable haze. The crossed legs are reminiscent of both a reclining nude and the supposed leisure of quarantine – but their suspension is stagnant, and used-up water reads as sour. In Becca Shwartz’s “Binghamton 3” the body is present in symbols – as two curtained windows anthropomorphize above a saturated orange carpet. The brightness and subtle distortion of space emphasizes the curtains as liminal; a fluid barrier that lets light in while preventing public exposure. However, the stillness of the image finds them shut, corralling the viewer into the claustrophobic corner.

These notions of the confined give way into an indulgence in the quotidian, a kind of transcendent escapism that, through small but vague-magic adjustments, begins to exorcise reality . If an ecstatic banality can bring us into a welcome break up with capitalism by making consumer trends irrelevant – then perhaps it charges power back into the individual. Casey Sayers Brooks finds ecstasy in paintings that revel in the viscosity of a stain. A small spill that sinks into instead of on top of, interrupting looping paths that produce weaponized ruptures in order. The still life is made humorous in Mat Gasparek’s ink drawings – becoming a coy meditation on the objects unceremoniously left on a table. Personal effects are objectified to the point of pattern – a reduction that recontextualizes the objects and demonstrates the ideologies existing within the inanimate. This is also felt in Christina Vogel’s painting “Studio Painting With Chair”, where a palette of mid-value steamy warms solidifies the meta subject as dark comedy. 

When quarantine becomes a platitude, we have the opportunity for a  cultural shift in our collective psyche.  This speculation is experienced in the paintings of Lee Piechocki, Kristen Sanders, and Sofia Belkin. In Lee Piechocki’s “I've Been Crazy This Week: Wednesday” the red monochrome is lifted out of the macho and into a bedroom. The softness of the lamp’s smoke is both calming and uneasy and the red bath of a file folder is illusionary,  identifying a threshold and invoking a vague drama that connects to the emotional energy of a rental. Kristen Sanders conjures an insular cave space of ancient feminist consciousness. Layers of dissociative neons produce a transparent glow that suggest supernatural light sources. Feeling spectral but rooted, the domestic space is rendered powerful. In Sofia Belkin’s “Fence Looker” embroidery is used to generate productive voids into amorphous landscapes. The stretch of the fabric against the frame distorts mangrove-like pools of brush, thus becoming portals rather than natural fences.  The portals welcome the viewer, mimicking the fluid strength of a weave of threads. 

Ultimately, FRC5 teases domestic mundanity and clocks the uncanny violence of self- quarantine inherent in a stratified class system. The works use the tools of the everyday (a curtain as liminal, a stain producing a schism, a folder reading as a doorway) to abstract and re-construct domesticity in order to reach a colloquial sublime. In this inversion, the low-brow domestic becomes intimidating to mainstream systems because it threatens to opt-out.

May 15, 2020