My Hands Are My Bite Lilli Carré, Laura Davis, Carol Jackson, Diane Simpson

Curated by Dan Gunn

7 June – 2 August, 2014

This publication was created on the occasion of group exhibition My Hands Are My Bite, curated by Dan

Gunn in the summer of 2014 at moniquemeloche.

© 2015

My Hands Are My Bite, 2014 Installation view

My Hands Are My Bite Curatorial statement by Dan Gunn

Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.1

The title "My Hands are My Bite" comes from a work by Laura Davis that references a Gabriel

Orozco terra-cotta work from 1991 My Hands Are My Heart with which Davis has a “complicated love /

hate relationship".2 The hands in the title are same hands of the handled, the hand-picked, even the

man-handled.3 These are the haptics of consumerism: To bite or not to bite. The very metaphor of

consumption is aggressive, implying not only the ingestion of products into one's life but the

determination of the consumer to either rescue or relegate objects to obscurity. These are the hands of

taste –the consumer palette.

The four artists in this exhibition, Diane Simpson, Lilli Carré, Laura Davis, and Carol Jackson, use

various historical aesthetics. From Art Deco flourishes of the Gilded Age seen in the work of Diane

Simpson to the materials of the American frontier that Carol Jackson employs in her worked leather and

sculptural forms, to International Style modernism seen in Laura Davis’ vitrine sculpture and Lilli Carré’s

blend of folk Americana each artist exhibits a formal poly-temporality and purposeful engagement with

vintage decorative styles.

In Diane Simpson’s work, a meditation on structure emerges as the content, considering the

meaning and history of decorative forms. Moving through an analysis (in the psychoanalytic sense) of

design tropes of display, representing and modifying bodies through fashion, and commercial display it

becomes a form of analysis of the ideology of style. In her hands these discarded forms of life in Art

Deco become models for androgynous new primary forms. With Carol Jackson the aesthetics hail from

early American industrialization and its mythic Western frontier. In Jacksons recent sculpture

anachronistic sculptural forms drawn out of celebratory Americana sheet music collide with digital

webcam imagery. Taken from national park archives, the camera footage catalogs a patch of sky or

records a forest fires’ progress. The graphic forms from the sheet music retain their remote and festive

1 Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. (New York: Picador, 1990), p 285.

2 Davis, Laura. Interview with the author, 2/23/14

3 In this context, man-handled refers to thrift store shopping and the repeated use of materials

feeling, even as they twist outward. Like a webcam of nothing, the sculptures drain the entertainment

medium of actual entertainment and unveil it as ruthless, unresponsive and banal.

The aesthetics of Mod become a theater of small scale objects and inscribed intricacies in Laura

Davis' work. Davis combines the structures of store display and the corporeal bodies of fashion

mannequins into tableaus of historical association. In the collision of the handmade and the found, the

reality of before and after, the old and the new dissolve leaving a distilled and vulnerable form of style

for consideration. For Lilli Carré, the individual is always under construction. In books, animations,

sequential drawings, and porcelain ceramic figures the person is always a fragile body; a little too

pliable, in need of constant catharsis. Mixing the aesthetics of Modernism with American folk forms the

work takes on a provisional character as if social progress needs continual gentle reinforcement and

reevaluation.

Poly-temporality is the experience of multiple registers of time within the present; where the

past is never really gone and the future is already passé. This is easy to experience in fashion where

certain articles re-occur ad infinitum or whole subcultures form around fusions of the future and the

past like steampunk or others. In Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp she reflects on the relationship

between the perception of time and the camp aesthetic. Thinking through past times shifts the

experience of the consumer-driven moment and makes its values look arbitrary, overblown and strange.

Camp revels in this feeling of strangeness and proudly wears the results in a form of playfulness. While

the stylistic forms in this exhibition are arguably outmoded, they eschew camp's outrageousness and

detachment, while maintaining the focus on style. In My Hands are My Bite styles are under serious

consideration, interrogated for their latent properties, chastised for their relationship to oppressive

current practices and mined for their potential as possible new forms of life.

This vintage archaeology also represents skepticism of progress as an essential part of the

contemporary. Outmoded aesthetics are also useless, archaic, or primitive when viewed from a

Modernist historical lens. Here the charge of nostalgia reads as a modernist epithet for skepticism of

progress. Past styles are also passed-over styles. Mass cultural style is the product of corporate

marketing and relentlessly broadcast through every avenue. This breeds a kind of reactionary fatigue or

cultivated skepticism in media consumers. In Concrete Comedy David Robbins describes this fatigue

with entertainment’s industrial culture in a passage on the pleasures of "so-bad-its-good" comedy:

We resent the shrill tone and [entertainment’s] deafening volume. We've discovered first-hand how inhuman, and inhumane, and just plain boring a seamlessly managed parade of

winners can be. [...] We've seen, in sum, that the particular way that our culture "does" winning too often has something smug and arrogant and kill-joy about it. Cumulatively these observations incline us to admit that a culture of winners fundamentally distorts some fundamental aspect of human existence. 4

What is the experience of the thrift store, antique mall or junk yard if not a perusal of the

remainders of culture post-hype, post-fashion? The antique is not automatically better than the

contemporary, but rather remote in time and present in body. Present perhaps, in a way that allows all

of their aspects to be seen more clearly than the objects of more current marketing campaigns. In each

of their ways Simpson, Jackson, Davis, and Carré work to revive overlooked aspects of human existence

in their objects. Their coordinates are our coordinates: the consumer landscape of commerce, fashion,

decor, architecture and style.

4 David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy, (Denmark: Pork Salad Press, 2011).

Lilli Carre

eight weeks (in the sun), 2014

6 small glazed ceramic pieces on UV glass, construction paper, and wood

5 ½ x 36 x 1 inches

Lilli Carre

one day (in the shade), 2014

6 small glazed ceramic pieces on UV glass, construction paper, and wood

5 ½ x 36 x 1 inches

Lilli Carre

one second (in the dark), 2014

HD digital video loop on USB stick

Lilli Carré (b. 1983 Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist and

illustrator currently living in Chicago. Her animated films have shown in festivals throughout the US and

abroad, including the Sundance Film Festival, and she is the co-founder of the Eyeworks Festival of

Experimental Animation. She has created several books of comics, most recently the short story

collection, Heads or Tails, published by Fantagraphics. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, The

New York Times, Best American Comics and Best American Non-required Reading, amongst other

places. Carré is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL.

Laura Davis Cup and Balls (Cool Shell), 2014 Wood, mother of pearl wall covering, steel, wineglasses, resin, mylar, leather, glass paperweight, paper, paint, necklace, plastic Stonehenge pieces, bottle, cement, rhinestone, clay, pewter bowl, sequins, fake flocked rocks, earring backs. 10 x 25 x 59 inches

Cup and Balls (Cool Shell), 2014 (detail)

Laura Davis Cup and Balls (Warm Marble), 2014 Travertine marble pedestal, brass, steel, plastic bag, vintage political button, plastic thistle, wooden candles, felt, paper, paint, wine glasses, clay, rhinestones, books, string, agate, glue, microbeads, page from a Sotheby's catalogue 27 x 15 x 61 inches

Cup and Balls (Warm Marble), 2014 (detail)

Laura Davis

Neckslices 2-5, 2014

Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink

plastic, and eye shadow.

Dimensions variable

Laura Davis

Neckslice 3, 2014

Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink

plastic, and eye shadow.

14 x 17 ½ x 3 ½ inches

Laura Davis

Neckslice 2, 2014

Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink

plastic, and eye shadow.

6 x 5 x 3 inches

Laura Davis

Neckslice 1, 2014

Air drying clay, bronze, brass, copper, silver, steel, necklaces, charms, plastic, paint, electrical shrink

plastic, and eye shadow.

10 ½ x 5 ½ x 6 ½ inches

Laura Davis

My Hand Is My Bite, 2014

Candle, cardboard, chain, plastic, plaster, Flamin' Hot Cheetos, gargoyle, and wood

24 x 12 x 4 inches

Laura Davis (American, b. Holland, MI 1971, lives Chicago, IL) received her MFA from the University of

Chicago in 2004 and her BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996. She is currently an Instructor of

Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Davis’ recent solo exhibitions

include Unknown Pleasures at Chicago Artist’s Coalition (coinciding with her 2012-2013 Bolt residency

there); and Lock the Doors at slow gallery, Chicago, IL, with Jason Dunda. Her upcoming site specific

installation, Histrionic Renovation, in the Mies van der Rohe McCormick house at Elmhurst Art Museum,

Elmhurst, IL will open on Friday September 12, 2014. Her work has been featured in the group

exhibitions Homebodies at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Two Histories of the World (Part 2) at

Hyde Park Art Center, both in Chicago, IL. In addition to her Bolt residency last year, Davis has been

selected for the 2014 Elsewhere Residency in Greensboro, North Carolina. She’s been reviewed by the

Chicago Tribune, Newcity, and Abraham Ritchie listed her work in the “Top 10 of 2011,” for Art Slant.

Carol Jackson

Boo, 2014

Paper Mache, encaustic, motor

42 x 34 inches

Carol Jackson

Cod Piece, 2014

Paper Mache, acrylic, digital photograph

43 x 28 x 14 inches

Carol Jackson

Bouquet Portraits, 2014

Paper Mache, acrylic, digital photograph

37 x 23 x 19 inches

Carol Jackson (lives and works in Chicago, IL) received her BFA in 1987 from the University of California

at Los Angeles, followed by an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, where she is

now an adjunct associate professor of Contemporary Practices. She’s had several solo exhibitions in

Chicago galleries- most recently at Three Walls in 2014, and Slow Gallery in 2013. Jackson is currently

featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial in New York. Other recent group exhibitions include Suitcase Art

at Kunsthaus Speckstrasse in Hamburg, Germany, and Write Now: Artists and Letterforms at the Chicago

Cultural Center. Jackson’s work is included in the collections of the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Max

Becker-Düsseldorf, Germany; Mark and Judy Bednar-Chicago; and Guido Cabib-Naples, Italy, among

others. In addition to the press her work has received in Interview Magazine, Blouin Art Info, and the

New York Times, she is also a regularly contributing writer to Frieze magazine.

Diane Simpson

Collar (on altered table), 2014

Wood table, MDF, and enamel

34 x 25 x 12 inches

on the wall

Diane Simpspn

Window Dressing, 2014

Diane Simpson (b. 1935, lives and works Chicago, IL) received an MFA in 1978 and a BFA in 1971 from

the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most recently she had solo exhibitions at Corbett vs Dempsey,

Chicago, IL and at JTT, New York, NY. In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective exhibition of her sculpture and

drawings was held at the Chicago Cultural Center. An 88 page catalog was produced in conjunction with

this exhibit. Other past solo exhibitions include Phyllis Kind Galleries, Chicago, IL and New York, NY; Dart

Gallery, Chicago, IL; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and I Space Gallery, Chicago, IL. Simpson's work is

in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,

IL;and the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL, among others. Simpson's grants and awards include an

Arts Midwest/NEA Regional Fellowship; an Illinois Arts Council IAS-Project Grant; five Illinois Arts Council

Visual Artist Fellowship awards, and the Walter M. Campana and E. Garrison Prizes from the Art Institute

of Chicago’s "Chicago and Vicinity" exhibitions. She has been nominated for awards from the Louis

Comfort Tiffany and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundations. Diane Simpson is represented by Corbett vs

Dempsey in Chicago and JTT in New York.

moniquemeloche was founded in October 2000 with an inaugural exhibition

titled Homewrecker at Meloche’s home, and officially opened to the public in May 2001.

Working with an international group of emerging artists in all media, the gallery presents

conceptually challenging installations in Chicago and at art fairs internationally with an

emphasis on curatorial and institutional outreach.

moniquemeloche

2154 W. Division, Chicago, IL 60622

p 773.252.0299 www.moniquemeloche.com