Mountain

B. Dewitt Gallery, London, UK,

June 2019

Curator Camille Bréchignac

“You amuse me / I frighten you” is an exhibition consisting of two solo projects “Mountain” by American artist Tyler Eash and “Pearl” by American artist Christopher Hinojosa. Curated by Camille Bréchignac, the exhibition will present newly commissioned works across various mediums.

CREON

You amuse me.

ANTIGONE

Oh, no, I don’t. I frighten you. That is why you talk about saving me.

(Jean Anouilh, Antigone, 1944)

A critique of the current paradigm of identity politics, You amuse me / I frighten you initiates its point of departure from the perceived demand for sustained reenactments of “authentic” experiences and states of revolt. The legitimacy to critique is seemingly performed through an authentication of explicit, “authentic” displays/presentations of lacks of privileges or injuries that serve as testimonies of grievance. The speaking subject’s experience is turned into evidence of a lived documentation of the political then explored through exhibitionary gestures of abstraction and display. Raw life experience is re-presented and re-performed for the gaze of the audience, irrespective of the subject’s willingness to make this gaze the primary theme of the work.

The solo projects negotiate an interplay of authenticity/inauthenticity at the core of representation itself. Recognising the potential burden of a display of authenticity, Eash and Hinojosa blur the lines between the two. Both ask whether the unauthentic might be a tactic to obscure checks of authenticity thus allowing the subject greater authority. Uncovering the raw experience of objectification, Hinojosa’s Pearl utilises photography, installation, and performance to question the innate performativity of self by questioning the substance of the Western standards of class, gender, wealth. Hinojosa meets the viewer’s gaze with their own subjectivity and utilises the suspension of disbelief as a method of normalising the trans body and experience. Hinojosa reverses the viewer-viewed power dynamic by using the gaze as a weapon with which to reclaim the self. The works will be presented on a bespoke solid-ash table by French designer Léonard Kadid.

Eash’s Mountain employs tactics of theatre through sculpture, video, and performance, as a means to both embody as well as assume roles beyond the limits of Eash’s lived experience thus granting the flexibility to simultaneously assume power as well as allude to the artifice of power itself. Appropriating the aesthetic of neoclassicism, the works strategically engage both theatre and Neoclassic form; making it aware of its own artifice and intentions of manipulation. Eash’s solo project also features a special collaboration with Pierre-Yves Morel an expert faux-marble finisher.