Freak Scene posits that available information, regular views and free narratives imprint and embed themselves into adjacent materials. Here, each position is counterbalanced with the other. The questions are supplying just enough and the resulting work functions best in orbit to their prompts. This methodology is warm; the process is like a figure running alongside “research art” and pointing laterally. This show is a hunt, not for prey, but for a path. The forms house the questions that begot them.
Hopefully, the coattails of Judd hang just heavy enough to make the ground pliant. Marnie’s wall works, like shafts or truncated obelisks, replicate, and are named after Michael Mann films. It seems like a borrowed cinematic climax left a brash imprint. They read like tomes whose titles are waterlogged. Aujla drives us toward the most intimate and assumed givens of our domestic life. He relies on simple discourse to produce objects that want to take flight. No esthetics of research interrupt them. Marcus’ works begin with photographs of a Tony Smith sculpture which has been inert for decades in a public plaza, relatively unmaintained. The sculpture now looks more like a worn out performer. The work pitches that maybe now both the sculpture and the photograph of it have leached out of their category.
All three artists have been working directly with the sites in their recent exhibitions. Here they nod to an aura of the context instead. Security and personal space are present; between control and lack of vibrates. Like the unchecked curiosity that identical twins elicit - these works are like appendages of existing conditions. They are a distorted mediation of available information. An action film blown through limitation. A populist submarine.
