Outta Time - Joshua Bienko and Lester Merriweather at Tristar Arts
Published August 8th 2024
By Mary Laube
Installation view, Joshua Bienko at Tristar Arts, photo courtesy Bruce Cole
Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Contract of Photography states that when a photograph is made, so too is a dynamic relationship between the photographer, the subject, and the spectator. She writes, “Photography is an apparatus of power that cannot be reduced to any of its components: a camera, a photographer, a photographed environment, object, person, or spectator.”(1) While a camera captures the likeness of something, its ability to be and seen across time and space, gives the subject political agency and power over its narrative. Photographs are fragments, determined by a frame; they are inherently “incomplete,” or rather flexible in their ability to participate the generation of meaning. The same can be said for painting, sculpture, or any other artform for that matter. Content exists across multiple dimensions: context, materiality, form, and most importantly, its viewership. Art is therefore inseparable from the concept of fragmentation, or in other words, collage. The relational truth of an artwork, its multiplicity, and its nonadherence to any single authority is what gives it life and agency beyond any one of us. This is where the power of art as an avenue for political agency becomes evident.
Looking at this exhibition Outta Time, through the lens of collage shows us how the works of Lester Merriweather and Joshua Bienko engages with, circumvents, and antagonizes the ways in which the world is represented. Beyond its simple definition as a process of cutting and pasting paper, collage is a process of building images and ideas via unapologetic fragmentation. In doing so, the act of collage can work as a form of truth-telling that resists the need to essentialize or remain whole.
Installation view, Lester Merriweather at Tristar Arts, photo courtesy Bruce Cole
The work of both artists questions how to capture and represent the world within a system wrought with institutionalized inequity for the sake of capital gain. Bienko’s imagery of designer brands and luxury watches are accompanied by cartoon figures and tigers whose facial expressions contain a complex array of emotional states. Merriweather’s sculptural and collage works vary in material and image, expressing the inextricable connection between culture and commerce, and the colonial steppingstones we continue to walk on toward late capitalism. The strength of this show is not in the works didacticism, but the works ability to present problems, with incomplete answers. It is in our willingness to accept incompleteness that we can near the orbit of truth.
Joshua Bienko, Pavé, oil on linen, 16 x 20 in, photo courtesy of the artist
Joshua Bienko’s enigmatic paintings run circles around desire by presenting a heterogenous plate of imagery: watches, skulls, and tigers among others. Housed within loose, frenetic, and claustrophobic atmospheres, the paintings become surprisingly vast with varied manners in which each fragment is painted. His scope of handling paint carries us from photorealism to cartoon in a single work, while being crafted by the deeply emotional and tender poetics of oil painting by hand. The various ways in which he captures the appearance of something recognizable toes the line that separates the fake and the real, a very powerful construct that continues to evolve in sometimes terrifying ways. Designer patterns that originated from objects adorned by the world’s most elite are reproduced, faked if you will through delicately painted marks, which in turn, resist the urge to be discarded as a fake as it becomes its own kind of original. Photorealistic watches painted flat on the surface don’t quite exist in the illusory window of the painting but sit on the surface of the painting as an object, simulating a collaged piece of paper that hovers above the pictorial space of the painting. While they may appear as such, the watches in his paintings are not watches nor are they photographs of watches. They are vessels of desire, hope, disappointment, and resiliency. The simulacra are untethered to value determined by its supposed authenticity. In doing so, Bienko places us on a hamster wheel in which desire is never satisfied, yet our pursuit of the thing desired is the only thing that keeps us in motion. The surreal dream-like space in Pavé for example, positions the viewers gaze down an empty Kubrickian hallway. Our path is interrupted by a floating skull, a wristwatch, and a glimpse of a Goyard pattern: an amalgam of symbols reminiscent of memento mori painting, a gentle yet looming reminder of our inevitable death. Bienko’s collaging of references, images, manners of painting, and various spatial logics within a given work, produces an excitingly unpredictable oeuvre of works, that toe the line between pleasure and dissonance.
Lester Merriweather, TRILL (Prototype), acrylic, silkscreen on cardboard, 114 x 16 x 10 in., image courtesy of Bruce Cole
Lester Merriweather on the other hand shows us a significant range of materials and forms across the exhibition, all depicted in varying temperatures of black. It would be amiss however to simply describe his work in the show as all black. It is in the “sameness” of the color that his work commands our attention to more detailed nuances of color and material. Black, for instance is achieved by several different means: from found magazine clippings, applied screen-printing ink, applied paint to canvas, and dipped objects using plastic polymers. Color is not just a surface application but carries with it a material body that shifts from piece to piece, altering the spirit of the objects it merges with. In the center of the gallery two sailing ships sit on top of a small storage organizer. Having been dipped in liquid plastic, the objects have the appearance of being encased or embalmed, suspending the work as if frozen in time. Placed on the floor, reminiscent of toys or ships in bottles, the work touches on the miniature world, one that engages in the imaginary. While these objects are in the round they work much like an image, a portal in which we enter as we lose sense of our physical body. One of the most prominent pieces in the exhibition is Trill, a column of floor to ceiling stacked screen-printed boxes whose labels echo Warhol’s Brillo Box sculptures. Merriweather’s reference to Warhol gives an additional nod to a broader critique of consumer culture, labor, and mass production, however his boxes are not 1:1 appropriations as Warhol’s were. Trill presents the room with a promise of structural stability yet remains precarious in its materials of cardboard and screen-print. Stability and the potential for collapse are simultaneously present, perhaps a reminder of how institutions, norms, and other structures that we assume to be both self-evident and long lasting are neither. Merriweather is perhaps most well-known for his work that is more recognizably collage – works that are pieced together from magazine cut outs from popular culture, re-organized into abstract fields of color and locatable imagery. In thinking about the very real presence of absence in collage, one of his most surprising works is the piece Aftermath, which displays a black painting on canvas with the center cut out and removed. Here the cut, the removal, the fragmentation is retained as the work, as the thing to focus on: the remainder.
Out of Time is currently on view until August 28,2024 at Tri-Star Arts in Knoxville, TN.
Mary Laube is an Associate Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She received her MFA from The University of Iowa in 2012. Past exhibitions include the Knoxville Museum of Art, Ortega y Gasset Projects (NYC), VCU Qatar (Doha), Monaco (St Louis), and Coop Gallery (Nashville). She has completed artist residencies at Yaddo, the Wassaic Project, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others and her work has been featured in Art Maze Mag, Maake Magazine, and New American Paintings.