essay for Substitute Equal Amounts - Chicago Spleen
Some fairly uncontroversial truisms: Clouds are beautiful, death is inevitable, dogs are a man's best friend, and repetition begets difference.
A cliché knows it's worn out before it ever enters use––its melody is teleological; its yet unstated obviousness: panging. An almost instinctive barbarism threatens to overwhelm the senses when faced with something that gives itself so freely and without complication. People smash vases. They abuse dogs. Cosmetics are tested on rabbits.
The narcissism of small differences is a cliché machine and hates its output. We think our words, our lives, and our ideas are just a bit more special than that, but some things are inescapable, but to admit this with embarrassment will only beget embarrassment. Why not own up to it? Why not make a substitution? Swap shame for alacrity. Clichés are impatient; they say what they want immediately. Clichés are rehearsals; they ready us to alchemize expensive feelings from a world of cheap ones. A cliché is a replica, and it is as precious as you choose to make it. Clichés are sensibility’s toys; they can be made real only with love.
Maybe originality requires someone to grab hold of a cliché with such seriousness that they may as well have invented it themself. Blessed are those who can say something so obviously true that it might bypass the instinct to cringe. Instead, it might deliver some kind of alethic modality. What might society call those who do this? Guileless? Sincere? Earnest?
Rebekka Federle-McCabe’s wooden canine dummies are shapeshifters, always at the brink of inviting overattachment or abandonment. Perhaps this is not entirely unlike the real thing? Viewers foster them in their gaze and learn their quirks but rapidly realize they are learning their own. Are we pathetic? Stupid? Slapstick? Yearning to be made real in the eyes of another?
Laveen Gammie’s ceramic bunnies, ghosts, and pancaked cats cavort for a bacchanal in a tchotchke shop. Rabbits proliferate in birth, and ghosts multiply in death. At some somepoint in between, some sex was inevitable. Gammie prioritizes a subtle iterability over fungibility; for every likeness, there is a pronounced unlikeness that intrudes into their quaint familiarity. Where do things go after they’ve been used up? The thrift store, the basement, to heaven, in the foggiest reaches of our memories.
Susan Jablonski’s handbuilt vessels, cyanotype, and UV prints might seem like oppositional ends on the spectrum of utility, but what their means betray is a fervent devotion to ritualized creation. Cyanotypes and handbuilding both offer an expediance otherwise staggered by more mediated ceramic and photographic processes, and the space of ritual is always a space of immediacy that gives way to latency. In each process, light, heat, and the hand are integral, creating receptive objects that lie in waiting.
Federle-McCabe, Gammie, and Jablonski’s practices balance earnestness with a deft awareness of their means and materials’ semantic baggage. In fact, it might be the baggage they’re after most—not for the content, but for the container. Perhaps its form is historical, affective, or theoretical, but what’s certain is that each artist apprehends the givens of their subject matter and places the now-empty container promiscuously before their audience in the utmost good faith.
-gk