Through the surreal looking glass
Jordan Vinyard’s big solo exhibit high-tech, nontraditional eye candy with troubling aftertaste
“technology dislocates.” So begins Jordan Vinyard’s artist statement, and so begins this review. And that is only the beginning. The artist’s work itself, seen in her big solo show at Collar Works Gallery, “Parables for Proxies,” pursues mental and visceral dislocation in disarming ways. The work is sneaky because at first it looks like high-tech candy, and then it makes you queasy.
Vinyard’s work is equally elusive and troubling, particular and uncertain. It is its mashing of discomfort and distance that makes for its beautiful, insidious, enigmatic power. There are carnal and probably feminist overtones throughout, if you look for them. But a lot of the effect is on the surface. The work is technological, slick, and very well crafted, mixing video with refined synthetic materials like plexiglass, prosthetic silicone, and neon, along with leather and lots of those bandage clips used in medicine.
Bandage clips are a useful, if peculiar, entry point, because many of the works are about the physical body. For me, an unexpected jolt was “Vital Signs,” behind one of the central walls, where two small chest X-rays are mounted in frames. I watched, wondering about all the wires and machinery, and then something clicked in and the images themselves began to inflate, puffing from the walls like the bloated lungs they represent in real life.
There are simple works like a giant green neon piece that says: God. It has a sensor that seems to turn it on when you approach (if only the real God would do that). The title skews it a bit: “modern
religion/tin can to god.” Another straightforward piece, “maybe she’s born with it, maybe she’s man/machine,” has a pair of video screens showing a woman forcing cosmetic or dental accessories into her mouth in a grotesque and almost unwatchable performance.
More complex works involve moving parts that add their own strange chatterings and wheezings to the general din coming from the videos. Others need no sound for their strangeness. For “All the King ’s Horses,” two videos of the eyes of horses are seen through apertures in the middle of large silicone surfaces, mimicking those hoods that horses wear, revealing their oversized eyes. This makes you uncomfortable, the videos not quite showing enough to latch onto. If the intended effect is sympathy for the horse, it instead makes you itchy in your own skin.
None of the work in the show offers clean interpretation. Vinyard’s art has roots in familiar products like cosmetics (abused), cartoons (fractured), and saddles (pink and fuzzy). Most of the works are like small installations, or multivalent sculptural objects that let you circle around, and with moving parts in a genre often called kinetic sculpture, with video.
Parables for Proxies has the makings of a nightmare, a surrealist romp that does not suggest a happy ending. Unlike recent cultural fascinations with artificial intelligence, this is a dystopian future that is almost purely physical, and as such it is contained in the gallery. I had no qualms later in the day that I’d encounter Plexiglas, or prosthetic silicone objects, or even weird videos, in any real way. The fictional dramas remain fictional.
And dramatic. The work persuades partly with a finely honed materiality: the objects and installations are polished and uncompromising. Vinyard’s statement adds lots of deflective and clever phrases like “nihilist devices” and “volts prophesy,” and this reveals her ambiguous striving. But the results surpass the words. What she rightly calls an “absurd choreography” is to be experienced first-hand, even if you won’t want to take it home.