Psymulation: Reenactments of the Present

Photo Epicenter
26 Lilac Street, San Francisco, CA 94110
Monday – Saturday, 10am – 8pm
www.hamburgereyes.com
psymulation@chrisfitzpatrick.net
415-550-0701

Psymulation: Reenactments of the Present
March 14th–April 11th, 2008
Opening reception on Friday, March 14th from 6–9pm
Gallery hours are Monday – Saturday, 10am – 8pm

ARTISTS:
Gerald Edwards (New York)
Brennan Hill (Los Angeles)
Kent Lambert (Chicago)
Matthew Post (Oakland)
Squirrel (Indiana)
Brendan Threadgill (Los Angeles)

SAN FRANCISCO, CA (March, 2008)—Photo Epicenter presents Psymulation: Reenactments of the Present, an exhibition of contemporary artifacts closing April 11, 2008. This text is the combination of the press release and wall text for this exhibition, and will soon be transformed again into one of several extended essays in a catalog currently being produced. We will release this book at the end of the exhibition, coinciding with additional yet-undisclosed programming. If you are currently in the gallery, please press play on the tape player provided, if not, please go there now.

This text should be read while listening to an interview between researcher, conspiracist, and orchid smuggler, Dr. Armen Victorian (a.k.a. Henry Azadehdel, Habib Azadehdel, Henry X, and Cassava N’tumba) and retired U.S. Army Major Ed Dames, who performed psychic espionage for the U.S. Military. In addition to discussing Major Dames’ intriguing work in “Remote Viewing,” their recorded telephone conversation covers other bizarre territories—from UFOs and Mars to the reproductive mutilation of animals and the MJ12 Group. Their conversation sets the tone and provides a framework and point of departure for engaging with the work in this exhibition, but do you believe them?

When instances of science-non-fiction are disclosed to the public, such as those in the interview, the conspiratorial imagination and sci-fi feedback and become an automatic alibi; even the most nefarious revelation is reducible to the imaginative drivel of fringe paranoids. Others are relegated to conjecture through shredding and redaction, suffocated beneath incessant media distractions, or ignored in the general paralysis of cynicism. Yet as time slowly catches up, such revelations are key to approaching and understanding what might be happening today in the future, beyond reality and time.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

In the statement above, a Bush aide sends us all back in time as members of “the reality-based community,” as they forge a future we can only react to and try to make sense of from a key temporal remove. Their past is our present, yet our “reality” is hologramatic, hyperreal, and moreover, cultural study is time travel. To avoid fossilization, futurology becomes necessity, yet speculation is hardly “judicious.” In this non-time when now was, contemporary artworks—whether material or immaterial—are artifacts of a present, future, and past simultaneously, the exhibitions they comprise and sites they inhabit are interlaced interstices.

Psymulation: Reenactments of the Present includes a range of work by artists based across the U.S. who address a variety of ongoing criticalities heightened in the war on terror through artistic processes of appropriation and reconstitution, disruption and degradation, reclamation and re-contextualization. In addition to the conspiratorial abyss referenced earlier, the artists explore other forces of obfuscation and distraction, as well as recent changes in policy since the onset of the war on terror. PsyOps and the media, BlackOps and conspiracy, casualties and collateral damage, civil liberties and security, distraction and indoctrination, torture and liberation, the psychological and the physical, apophenia and paranoia, science-fiction, science-non-fiction, as well as notions of past, present, future, time and non-time surface throughout. Although these works were not necessarily created to illustrate the destabilization of time, they are, like everything, products of the divorce; they are reenactments of the present.

Following last year’s Swan Songs exhibition, Psymulation is the second installment in a series of projects Chris Fitzpatrick is curating for Photo Epicenter. Gerald Edwards III, Brennan Hill, Kent Lambert, Squirrel, and Brendan Threadgill have contributed work that will be on display from March 14 – April 11, 2008. Additionally, the opening reception will feature a psychological tuba performance by Matthew Post, and a catalog is being produced as an extension of the exhibition.

In Psych Securities LLC, an ongoing series of photographic composites by Gerald Edwards III, faceless PsyOps agents and technicolored HazMat workers inhabit strange environments from electromagnetic pulse tests to extraordinary rendition flight waiting rooms. He combines research into the black world of clandestine operations and experimentation with historical narratives and a heavy dose of psychedelic conjecture, envisaging realities shrouded in a stigma of conspiracy.

Appropriating various media distractions, Kent Lambert explores a number of pertinent issues from national security to international torture in three videos with sound. The trilogy—which consists of Security Anthem, Hymn of Reckoning, and Sunset Coda—features guest appearances by Tom Cruise, former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, the cast of Lost, G.I. Joe, and Lambert as a young boy, whose prescience has a particular resonance today.

Brendan Threadgill’s Partially Reconstructed Fragment (SKU# 3059778), the mangled roof of a car used as a bomb, sprawls across the floor in the center of the gallery. He refinished these materials in strict accordance with automotive industry standards, but avoided altering them structurally. Also included is Painted Fragment With Overspray, a two-panel diptych, that further reveals the impossibility of erasing or concealing the traces of violence and unknowable histories embedded within.

The recent hyper-aestheticization of torture has had a considerable effect on perception.Through association and apophoria, in Threatening Chair—a large photograph by Brennan Hill—a tool intended to aid the improvement of vision can be perceived as an instrument of infliction. Similarly, Sinus Horror, a drawing based on a highly detailed medical illustration has been reduced into a pulp-comic formalism that allows for multiple readings.

In Nuclear Holocaust, a video with sound by Squirrel, appropriated footage of nuclear explosions, desert warfare, and George W. Bush are combined with epic symphonic music and what the artist calls “a psychotic church radio program” about God, Satan, the Saints, and the apocalypse. Collateral Damage, another video with sound, collides the superficial with the unconscionable, revealing the causal relationship between two seemingly dichotomous images.

During the opening reception, Matthew Post will repeatedly perform “Enter Sandman” by Metallica on a tuba equipped with a sousaphone bell. The song has been used extensively to torture and terrify in Iraq and Afghanistan and brass instruments have been used as psychological weapons in war for thousands of years. The performance is made more poetic by an interview on NPR, in which Metallica-singer James Hetfield paradoxically stated, “If the Iraqis aren’t used to freedom, then I’m glad to be part of their exposure.”

For high-resolution photos, more information, or descriptions of the included works, please email psymulation@chrisfitzpatrick.net