Despite appearing like a fairly straightforward Vallejo storefront, a few clues hint at Personal Space’s mutability. There’s even a “sign,” if you could call it that, mounted to the edge of the building. For the duration Slipper, it’s a halftone-dotted black-and-white image of something involving a hand.
A Vallejo Gallery Hosts a Slippery Show of Thrilling Distortions
Erik Frydenborg, 'Nonnnecenonnn,' 2022, with pieces by Kari Cholnoky behind. (Photo by Bessma Khalaf and Ginger Fierstein)
Distortion is a perfect visual announcement for the current show, curated by the art space’s founder and director, Lisa Rybovich Crallé. Since Personal Space opened in July 2023, Crallé and guest curators have organized eight group shows, bringing together local, national and international artists, commissioning writing and editions, and hosting some of the best-attended openings in recent Bay Area history.
If these presentations have shared a hallmark, it’s an embrace of texture and material experimentation. Any given exhibition might contain paintings, yes, but there’s also a possibility of objects cast in oozy resin hanging on the gallery walls. The most recognizable objects in Slipper are a pair of framed drawings, but what they depict … well, that’s up for interpretation.
In a show about slipperiness, a certain amount of horizontality is expected. Suitably, Erik Frydenborg’s Nonnnecenonnn, the first piece to greet visitors’ eyes, is a stretched-out sculpture of basswood, acrylic and sand. Curves and painted hatch marks hint at Frydenborg’s source material, an archive of infographics and diagrams from a bygone era. What at first glance looks like digital skew is, up close, delightfully tangible, with a rough texture running down the sculpture’s black-painted sides.
The horizon line continues with Elina Vainio’s And stones only breathe once, a flat oblong of sand on the gallery’s floor that contains delicate lines of weighted cord camouflaged within it. From the corner through Frydenborg’s piece, a clear line of sight to Kari Cholnoky’s wall-mounted paper-pulp sculptures: spiky objects made ominous by fluorescent red paint and the attachment of tiny, menacing images.
When we encounter indecipherable things, or, as Slipper artist Albert Herter puts it, objects “that cannot be fully accounted for,” multiple pathways emerge. We can cocoon ourselves against intrusion, which Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Sound Blanket No. 10 (psychically) welcomes us to do. The massive “fur” coat, made of hand-felted wool and human and synthetic hair, is a looming note of verticality in this very horizontal front room.
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We can strain for comprehension, suggested by Catalina Ouyang’s trio of elegantly carved stone ears. Or, a third option: lean into the dissonance and chaos, captured by Herter’s William T. Wiley-esque drawings of two figures pontificating in a frenetic landscape.
Sitting with the weirdness is the modus operandi of the exhibition’s second room, a smaller presentation of work by sculptor and video artist David Bayus, ceramic installations by Ximaps Dong and a second photographic print from Lemia Monet Bodden, also responsible for the exterior “sign.”
In a mix of live action and computer generated imagery, Bayus’ Sessions 1 & 2 begins with a robotic voice asking a pair of filthy arms, “Tell me, why did you create this? What does it mean to you?” A 27-minute video spins out from there, full of meticulously rendered machinery, unsettling sound bites, cowboy iconography and the artist posed as a grimy caveman, subject to an unknown scientific experiment.
Dong’s combination of ceramics, green plastic netting and steel bars fit right alongside this fleshy yet machine vision of the future. Despite its cheerful title, Caught The Catches, Yay looks like something straight out of David Cronengberg’s eXistenZ (a horror film that features a mutant fish farm and plenty of bony gristle).
In a moment of mass uncertainty (I write this on Nov. 5, as Americans cast their ballots), Slipper reminds us that uncertainty is now a constant state. The artworks included may have achieved a relatively fixed form, but they are momentary pauses in a chain of events: captured distortions that produce a rippling effect, a frisson, on their subsequent audiences. When everything is slippery and everything is mutable (including, unfortunately, facts), some combination of cocooning, hard listening and sitting with the disquiet will be the only way through.
‘Slipper’ is on view at Personal Space (1505 Tennessee St., Vallejo) through Nov. 24, 2024.
