(New York, NY) ABXY presents “CONVERSATION DERELICT” a solo exhibition by artist COREY WASH. “Conversation Derelict” marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery following “It’s a Jungle Out Here” (2018). The upcoming exhibition at ABXY showcases a new collection of the artist’s paintings as well as video and site-specific installation. “Conversation Derelict” will be on view from March 29 – May 15, 2019. Exhibition essay by Angela N. Carroll.
Working across a diverse range of media, artist Corey Wash explores the ideas evolving around environment, culture, and identity today. Wash often plays with concepts related to language and communication in her work, creating images populated by comic-style characters who speak directly to the viewer through confessional speech bubbles. With this exhibition, Wash dives deeper, focusing in on the subject of communication in the Digital Age by presenting scenes of contemporary life, which convey technology’s effect on the exchange of ideas and information today. In splashy, saccharine palettes, these latest cartoon portraits examine our dissociation with reality in a world of screens, signs, and symbols. In so doing, Conversation Derelict asks the question: Why do truth and knowledge feel so inaccessible in a world where we can share ideas and information farther and faster than ever? Taken together, the works in this exhibition suggest that if we don’t find a way to (re)engage with reality and access our collective intelligence, our technological interconnectedness may be our undoing.
An amateur horticulturalist and environmental enthusiast, with this collection, Wash compares her studies of communication in the natural world to her observations of (mis)communication across human culture today. In the work, language is considered from a biological standpoint. With paintings like “Where It All Started,” in which leaves extend towards a central human figure like cartoon tentacles, the artist invokes our innate capacity for symbolic thought (a trait that separates us from the animals), while reminding us that our communicative capabilities were naturally selected for survival in a physical world, not virtual one. By juxtaposing the idea that language developed as a tool for cooperation and collaboration in the wilderness with our inability to work together on threats to humanity as lethal as climate change or nuclear war, the works in this exhibition emphasize the power of language and communication in our individual and collective health as a society.
Within the exhibition, Wash’s installation, entitled "Research Room," satirizes the information overload we experience in contemporary life. Upon entering, the viewer will be surrounded by various forms of visual media projecting messages from all sides. The video on display inside the installation invites the viewer on a coded journey through the artist’s discoveries about early human language. Original audio accompanies the animation. Created in collaboration with MELO-X, beats derived from natural sounds, like waves and bird songs, help the viewer navigate the semiotic visual narrative.
COREY WASH (b. Baltimore, Maryland) works across a diverse range of media as she explores the ideas evolving around environment, culture, and identity today.
As comfortable behind the camera as in front of it, Wash initially moved to New York in 2011 to pursue a career in photography and modeling. Working alternately as artist and subject, she became inspired to express the liminal space between these experiences as moved from photography into media like painting and drawing. In a palette reminiscent of papelpicado(Mexican party banners), the artist began filling notebooks, wood panels and canvasses with cartoons depicting her interior life.
Taken together, the artist’sbitinglyfunny pictures form a cartoon-scape of contemporary concern. While much of Wash’s work is autobiographical, her gender/race non-specific character, Willoughby, is not a direct stand in for the artist – rather, Willoughby channels the many human characters Washencounters in her life. In scenes which seem to cut through reality, Willoughby and his friends consider the complicated business of saving humanity from threats like global warming, racism, misogyny, ignorance and poverty.
In the tradition of artists like Red Grooms and David Shrigley, the doodle realm illustrated in Wash’s work serves as a lightly veiled caricature of the world we live in today. But here in the artist’s universe, characters confess thoughts and feelings they’d be more likely to Google or tell their therapist than say to someone’s face. Whether she draws a single figure on a sheet of construction paper or fills an oversize canvas with characters spilling out of comic-style windows – the artist’s unfettered honesty, sharp wit, and thoughtful restraint animate scenes capable of instantly captivating the viewer. In contrast to the veritable media frenzy we experience daily in contemporary life, herwork has the uncanny ability to immediately capture the viewer’s attention and direct our focus inwards.
Through her characters’ confessional nature, the artist appeals to our humanity while revealing and an age of anxiety perhaps unparalleled in human history. Today, headlines in hyperbole clog our inboxes and newsfeeds. As we scroll unblinkingly on, we absorb reports of innumerable horrors while trying to emotionally, intellectually, and logistically cope with the realities they announce. In thought and speech bubbles which read like snappy Instagram captions, Willoughby and his pals give us a glimpse into the effects of a rapidly changing world on a generation attempting to move forward into an ever uncertain political, environmental, and technological future. By connecting to our inner lives, Wash’swork succeeds in producing moments of self-consciousness, introspection, and thoughtfulness in the viewer and in so doing – provides the fertile psychological ground required to heal this planet, ourselves, and each other.