Uncool

April 2–30, 2016 / Terrault Contemporary / Baltimore, MD

10 things you didn’t know about the Wickerham & Lomax show:

1. Boosting ideas from tired artworks is an erotic gesture.
2. Pumping through life on someone else’s frequent flyer miles is supreme luxury.
3. Killing trends by being late to them, maximizing lateness to a point of infinity.
4. A fucked up kind of bricolage solidified into an elegant turd.
5. Being quiet, yet screaming telepathically.
6. Supplementals have a way of burrowing to the center.
7. I wanna steal your shit. I wanna take your vision.
8. Presenting glass in which you can’t be reflected, but still shattered.
9. Wardrobe stolen from geeks online.
10. Should we thank Joanne? Never give credit.

The ten statements above can be applied to any of the ten digital paintings in the show as functioning titles. The paintings are at once about the props which are stylistically culled from the look of W&L’s Boy’dega: EditedforSyndication and then the item chosen is presented in various types of display. In Boy’dega’s narrative, it’s suggested that one of the characters, Kimbra, works in an antique store owned by her parents. This works as a prompt not completely coinciding with the mandates of the world building’s continuity, but as an offshoot to extend further world building possibility. The manner to which the props are presented, becomes a way to further inform the fiction of these items, to provide them with a logic structure that could lead towards reality (believability). The process of generating these paintings works like a kind of assemblage, certain aspects during the CGI process are cut from other models and recombined to create a new set of conditions/context for the CGI model.

The core ideas of the exhibition are: provisionality, display, artifact, speculation, and style. In their practice Wickerham & Lomax have made the forms that are peripheral elements to a television show be the core of their works — elements that fortify the aspects of commitment to truth in a fiction. These often include: character profiles, wardrobe, set/location, trailers, and now props. This way of working acts as a metaphor of giving anything of marginality an added value not to be diminished by the thing of centrality. The works themselves have a symbiotic relationship feeding of the other’s waste and generating a kind of value for themselves.

Thrift, steal, destroy, ponder, messy… apologize.