Doom and Bloom Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff
May 7th - 28th, 2022 Opening Reception: May 7th, 7-11pm On view Saturdays 12-6pm
Doom and Bloom is an exhibition of prints, sculptures, and sound by Alex Boeschenstein, Anthony Rundblade, and Emma Rossoff. As our world teeters on the precipice of runaway global warming, with pandemic mutations and Satanic Panic revivals curdling inside capitalist cycles of crisis and collapse, these three artists ask the question: how does one make art about and within this in-real-life apocalyptic stream? With a mixture of hope, humor, and horror, their vision invokes the absurdity of being suspended within the bog-water monotony of an unevenly collapsing system, of dangling helplessly by a string, watching on as the outmoded refuse to die.
Each artist develops their own reflections but with collaborative leakages across works. There is a shared focus on the vehicle and the confined space, alluding to the (im)possibility of escape. Modes of transportation fall apart as the way forward inverts, twists, and coils like a mobius strip. Moving through the culverts, gravity and scale intensify as the familiar becomes estranged. Creatures, avatars, everyday objects, and schematic systems emerge from the rubble weirder than before.
Emma Rossoff builds constellations of found and crafted objects. For Doom and Bloom, Rossoff has mummified and metamorphosed a collection of forgotten, gifted, and stolen debris into her own nocturnal playpen. Anthony Rundblade is a printmaker and sculptor interested in the residue and reverberation of the found image and object, often framing his artwork in the principles of the Grotesque. In Doom and Bloom, Anthony recalls contemporary media images of unruly passengers duct-taped to airline seats, bound to uncontrollable destinations by future promises and delusions. Alex Boeschenstein is fixated on history, how it haunts the present and how it failed the future. For the exhibition, he materializes rhetorical devices from the homiletics of American religious revivals and subsumes hyper-rational engineering documents he salvaged from an abandoned sulphur mine into realms of eerie illegibility.
If we are trapped in this sclerotic system’s labyrinth of tunnels, then Doom and Bloom is a playful attempt by three artists to drill a keyhole view with inadequate machinery into the reinforced concrete confining us.
