Girth Proof Vol. II is a recalibration of Wickerham & Lomax’s recent exhibition, Girth Proof (Dem Passwords, Los Angeles, 2015), which cast its participants from Craigslist and rendered their likenesses in CGI as bulked-up, busy-body event planners. Here they are reincarnated with an empty schedule and an empty stomach.
Girth Proof Vol. II pivots on the exhaustion of being visible, active, and participatory. On view are four large-scale, double-sided male odalisque images positioned to expand and collapse the gallery’s physical space by allowing the images in proximity to absorb one another through digital reflections. A sense of vertigo is extended into the gallery’s second room, where the first room’s checkered floor motif occupies a vertical axis in an oversized vinyl image. Frozen in ice or stuck behind glass, a series of paintings, elevated window decals, framed club paraphernalia, and a video proposing a collection of rotating ass purses add to the density of an installation intended to simulate the excitement of brushing past a crush at the club. Additional components of Girth Proof Vol. II include an extensive narrative, BOY’Dega (duoxduox.com), and the Baltimore LED Art Billboard in Station North Arts District (North Charles and Lanvale).
* Opening Reception photos by Alex Ebstein
Girth Proof Vol. II is an extension of the Khroma Klub, a distinct realm of BOY’Dega where the cast revels in the ruins of General Idea’s Chroma Key Club. Much in the spirit of General Idea, Wickerham & Lomax’s work has commonly split from the physical walls of the gallery into a decentralized, pervasive, and networked system, finding its audience through various forms of agency. This exhibition is the latest in a series of spin offs from the artists’ current project, BOY’Dega, a serial, supplemental media-driven, televisual website. It takes its codes from online streaming platforms, viral featurettes, and pre-visualizations in order to complicate the established roles of the fan, actor, character, and author.
Wickerham & Lomax is the collaborative name of the Baltimore-based artists Daniel Wickerham (b. 1986, Abbeville, South Carolina) and Malcolm Lomax (b. 1986, Columbus, Ohio). Formerly known as DUOX, the two have been working together since 2009. W&L have developed a searching, nuanced practice that applies a keen critical intuition and fine-tuned irreverence to the problems and potentialities of our contemporary media ecology. Working across diverse media, curatorial platforms, and institutional contexts, they have created a body of work at once context-specific and broadly engaged with networked virtualities. W&L are particularly invested in questions of identity and the body, exploring the impact – profound, ubiquitous, ambivalent – of digital technologies and social spaces on the formation of subjectivities and speculative corporealities.
Recent exhibitions by Wickerham & Lomax include Girth Proof at Dem Passwords Los Angeles, CA (2015) the premiere of Encore in the AFTA LYFE at the Artists Space (Frieze), NY (2014) and BOY’Dega: Edited4Syndication for New Museum’s First Look series (2014). Other solo shows include DUOX4Larkin, Artists Space, New York (2012); Liste Exhibition, Contemporary Museum of Art, Baltimore (2011); Break My Body, Hold My Bones, CCS Bard Hessel Museum, New York (2011); MoMT: Museum of Modern Twink, GLCCB bookstore, Baltimore (2010); and King Me, Open Space Gallery, Baltimore (2009).
