#pfeifferwalz

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HOGG

Self-Extinguishing Emission

Album Art / Insert by PfeifferWalz

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PfeifferWalz

Veneration VI & Veneration IX

Sumi Ink on Paper

5′ x 8′ (each), 2016

Exhibition PANTHEON, at Davis Gallery, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY

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PfeifferWalz

Veneration V

Sumi Ink on Paper

5′ x 8′  

2016

Exhibition PANTHEON, at Davis Gallery, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva NY

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Noli me Tangere

Noli me Tangere: Selections from the Solve et Coagula series

This selection of collages, part of an ongoing project by Ryan M. Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz under the title Solve et Coagula, derives from their ever-growing atlas of source material. As the title of this body of work suggests, the artists approach collage in terms of alchemy, a means of dissolving and coagulating images from Art History’s vast archive into new artworks—a synthesis of the elements from which they are built. 

In this series, Pfeiffer + Walz re-imagine Mary Magdalene and Christ’s narrative of loss and mourning by focusing on the desire that subtly pervades their story. Mary becomes an icon not only of ceremonial grief but empowered eroticism, her fleshly immanence contrasting with Christ’s transcendental nature. Individually, the collages cut together biblical scenes with fragments culled from Paleolithic sources to contemporary art. The ensuing tableaus are disjunct yet cinematic, unfolding into a resonant drama of longing, seduction, and intimacy—themes that are often abstracted or omitted entirely regarding the sourced iconography. One finds recurrent images of hands clasping one another, reaching across empty space to make contact, and leaving behind ghostly traces on walls they’ve touched. Fire and cut flowers collide with bloody flesh and crumbling landscapes. Bodies strike operatic poses, writhing in ecstasy or lying lifelessly, always suspended between anguish and elation for what the connection of touch threatens and promises.

Notions of touching and cutting inherent to the technique of collage are therefore reflected within the motifs of the series: one cuts out an admired painting of Mary, herself being cut off from touching Christ one last time; Anna Mendieta entombs herself into the sanguine earth and Apollo’s forbidden touch turns Daphne into a tree; Helen Frankenthaler caresses her canvas with fluid paint, a woman pleasures herself, and Forrest Bess cuts a hole into himself; doubting Thomas probes Christ’s cut, and Andre Breton touches a prehistoric cave drawing because he doubts its authenticity. The distinct treatment of these subjects coalesce under the resounding phrase noli me tangere.

1. Prophesy of the Pieta, collage on paper 2. Pink Steam, collage on paper 3. Sparagmos & Omophagia, collage on paper 4. Ablution & Sublimation, collage on paper 5. Like a leaf clings to the tree, collage on paper 6. Or which I cannot touch because they are too near, collage on paper 7. Noli me Tangere, collage on paper 8. The tomb that brought her impatience, collage on paper 9. Echo, collage on paper 10. Recapitulation of Mary Magdalene, collage on paper

Solve et Coagula

A series of collaborative collages by PfeifferWalz

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SPERM CULT

November 11—January 5, 2019

Opening Reception: Sunday, November 11, 2018, 3:00pm—6:00pm

Elijah Burgher ektor garcia Richard Hawkins Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz Ariana Reines & Oscar Tuazon Scott Treleaven

Our origins are in sex. And so too are our origin stories, from rudimentary creation myths to the most widespread of organized religions. Venerating the forces of creation in their sexual guise is as old as the species itself. As a central aspect of being, procreation is a metaphor for creation and existence in a fundamental and more general sense. Sex in sacred terms is how we speak of generation and regeneration, from the conception of the universe to the sprouting of crops. These metaphors are at the core of all that falls under the rubric of culture. It is hardly surprising that our earliest talismanic objects should be attributed to fertility cults wherein lie the origin of art; an origin the exhibition Sperm Cult suggests we never left.

Sperm Cult is a group exhibition featuring eight artists. It developed out of a collaborative book project of the same name by Elijah Burgher and Richard Hawkins. The initial collaboration featured elements of each artist’s practice; Burgher’s interest in the occult and Hawkins’ interest in ethnographic sexual taboos and rituals. For the exhibition, Burgher and Hawkins were invited to re-conceive the project wholesale, soliciting the participation of other artists whose work shares similar themes of sex, sexuality, transgression, desire, and ritual.

If societies are founded upon a sexual matrix, the heart of which is reproduction of the species, then sexual cults and subcultures of every stripe, past and present, represent a boundary from which to critique and theorize society at its most fundamental level. Such is the case with Sperm Cult. As its title makes clear, Sperm Cult is an unabashedly phallocentric affair. It features post-industrial herms (Reines & Tuazon); visual hexes and sex magic (Burgher); photographic flights of homosocial and homosexual fantasy in a variety of psychedelic colors (Hawkins/Burgher); filigree fetishes and a witchy chain logotype (garcia); the Salivation Army’s cultic call to arms (Treleaven); and an art historical survey that is less a linear trajectory and more a circle beginning with paleolithic fertility cults and ending with Forrest Bess (Pfeiffer+Walz).

Lead support for Sperm Cult provided by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. Major support provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. Generous support provided by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.

This program is also presented with the support of the City of West Hollywood's WeHo Arts program. For more information, please visit www.weho.org/arts or follow via social media @WeHoArts.

LINK

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