Girth Proof II

March 21–April 18, 2015 / Springsteen / Baltimore, MD

save me bro

Springsteen is delighted to present Girth Proof Vol. II, an exhibition featuring new work by Wickerham & Lomax, opening Saturday, March 21st at its new location: 502 West Franklin Street, Baltimore, MD 21202. The exhibition will be on view through April 18, 2015.

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).

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.