BmoreArt

Chapman’s contributions revisit the transgressive sculptural practice that gained him notoriety as one of the Enfants Terribles in his native Britain. Using startlingly lifelike prosthetics to impose grotesque facial disfigurations onto deconstructed mannequins, his penchant for fantasy is ripe with the implication that truth is often stranger than fiction.

A new series is composed of severed heads mounted on spikes that have a fairy-tale-like quality. They gaze out at a hauntingly empty children’s play table set for seven, a nod to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Surreal distortions of scenes from the Disney film adaptation are engraved in the backrests as if left over from a nuclear disaster.

The injection of brutality and historical symbols of conquest into a dialogue between pieces that could have come out of a children’s story poses a critique against the misguided American valour that not only perpetuates militaristic cycles of oppression on a global scale but has failed to tangibly protect the innocence of its own children in a recent slew of domestic mass shootings. This is echoed by an assortment of sculptures made up of children’s water guns and assault weapons encased in mounds of glittery resin.

A color scheme recalling the bubblegum pop of the newly-vintage early 2000s casts these playthings and tools of mass violence with a candy-like sheen that parallels the veneer of innocence painted over a pathological attitude towards violence that underpins the fanaticism driving mass murder in contemporary America. The makeshift armory flanks another hyper-realistic sculpture.

The seemingly innocuous work “Gwynplaine”—a sculpture of a little girl bearing a backpack—has the same off-putting, impish features as Chapman’s other figures, though hers are only revealed in the reflection of a mirror on the adjacent wall.

As the viewer peers over her shoulder, confronted by their own reflection alongside her malformed face, they are drawn into a disconcerting moment of self-recognition and complicity. They may also wonder if “Gwynplaine” herself is en-route to terrorize an imaginary classroom. Her disturbing reflection questions the illusion of comfort and safety pushed by suburban idealism, serving as a bridge to Jason Yates’ works lurking on the opposite wall.

The densely shelved sculptures composed of the detritus of American consumerism—garden gnomes, kitschy inspirational signs that read things like “love” and “dream”, holiday decorations—are entombed in a spotless coat of black enamel. Made up of found objects from thrift stores or discarded in landfills, these monochromatic assemblages are steeped in a nostalgia twisted by abandonment in decay.

They carry the somber air of lost aspirations evoked by Chapman’s “Gwynplaine” and the empty children’s table. The longer one tries to decipher individual objects on each shelving unit, the more biomorphic the works become. In a moment of overstimulation, the eye only sees an excess of waste, a sludge made up of the shadows of a nation that once thrived on optimism and now grapples with the weight of its own obsolescence.

The one commercial good Yates has not solidified as a reject with an oppressive black coating overlooks the rest as a silent sentinel. A chrome-plated troll with bushy black hair and a tail seems to celebrate the morose transformation of familiar suburban comforts into relics of a bygone era, mocking the shattered grandeur of the American Dream. He is reminiscent of an auctioneer at a foreclosure sale, candidly examining the plunder of a failed journey to prosperity.

The eerie convergence of fantasy and reality in Too Little Too Late offers a darkly humorous framework within which to dissect American culture and its apparent decline that is supercharged by the dichotomies of nostalgia and trend brought to mind by its paradoxically chic, yet inviting home at von ammon co.