I’m typing this on my phone, the only possible way at the moment, so apologizes for its brutish nature. Apologizes because I’m in the middle of the woods, 30 + miles from even a small town, and it seems like I’ve left it all behind but the clicky clack on the LED screen tells me otherwise. Some people are getting ready for school, to attend or teach, but my partner and I are trying to enjoy the last bit of summer away from our jobs
and society. So we’ve got ourselves on a small lake in the woods with a one room cabin and water that smells like farts, and everything is nice and comfy. On the walls are prints from the direct category of hotel art: bleeding kitsch, soft pastel colors to brighten the room, even the meta print of what you are doing hanging near the door in case you would forget that you are not at home afraid of life, you are out here afraid of life.
“Majestic Lion” by Sylvia Duran
“Majestic Lion” by Sylvia Duran is a loose, blobby portrait of a male lion, culled from both French Impressionism and supermarket romance novels. The subject stands hesitant with mane and fur waving in the breeze, either dusk in the plains of Africa or the set of a shampoo commercial. The lion’s legs taper to the ground with the delicacy of tree trunks. From his perch of slab rock he surveys his kingdom – a vague smear of gray and umber barely established on the canvas. And so with its uncertainty, it becomes an apocalyptic wasteland. The resulting carnage of light paint splatters completely engulfing the scene, bathing the lion in a snowstorm of ash. Or dandruff, since it really may be an ad for shampoo.
“Bengal Tiger” by Don Balke
To to the left of this, the big cat theme continues with “Bengal Tiger” by Don Balke. Surrounded by tall grass and immersive reflecting water, Balke’s portrait is a highly skilled colored pencil meets water color portrayal of one of the worlds fiercest predators doing an impression of Falcor, the Luck Dragon. To note is Balke’s use of abstraction, taking full advantage of the tigers stripes and how they map the water while melting in it. The aspiring indie band should seek this image out, rotate the tiger and his reflection 90•, so his orientation is vertical and they would have a sweet album cover to go with their sweet, sweet sound.
Theres also also a cartoon of some mice bathing in a tea cup hanging above the toilet which is far cuter than the act of me peeing while viewing it. A small painting of fat geese, painstakingly rendered, standing in a bombed out green and straw colored nowhere. A total mind game while washing your hands, this unassuming meditation ties Duran’s apocalyptic scene with Balke’s “Never Ending Story” reference, as we must all confront The Nothing.
The most impoverished of all is the small print mounted on wood near a couple bunkbeds, which everyone, from the artist, to the mall sales clerk, to the Innkeeper / curator had the intelligence to see that glass and a frame would be wasted. Here, a panther suffering from a belly ache is trying to shit in the trees amidst Renaissance laser light shows from the sun.
Shooting fish is a barrel, you say. It’s not fair to discuss this work in the context of an art blog, nor is it right to hold the innkeeper to the same task as the curator, of course. But I don’t just write for the sheer pleasure of destroying. The print I haven’t mentioned yet is my favorite. In it, two decoy ducks sit on a table with a jug and a small jewelry box. The wood grain of the box allow the wooden ducks a place of hiding. While the jug itself pushes the sense of country home, the bird painted on the jug speaks with the decoy facing it, crafting humor within the frame. Kathleen Cope Ruoss loses mastery over the jug, which flattens to the point of uncertainty, becoming a bluish gray mass without distinction. But the wood stays true, and looks tangible. The hard smooth surface reflecting the craft store heart plank wood, stained a light amber at home, or here in the cabin.
In hotel art, is it honesty or escape that we look for more? Wall accents or inspiration? To be noticed but unseen, the innocuous predators of tranquility. Even the shame-crapping panther knows he is just a bit player in your experience. His humility is hard to find in the art fair art we are about to be inundated with at Expo or Detroit Design week. Anyone who may be showing in the rooms and hallways in the hotels rooms at (e)merge take note. It is easy to surpass the quality of the art found on the wood grain paneling of B&B’s, or the sterile pastel walls of the Days Inns, HoJos and Hilton Expresses around the country. What hotel art offers us is our own level of kitsch. Comfort within the sterile and alien. A sense of peace even when the very work threatens our sensibilities of good taste. It is not meant to be looked at for long. But there are much worse things we see everyday.
- Media Theater - January 14, 2015
- The Armchair Critic: Mike Kelley’s “Channel #1, #2, #3” - December 10, 2014
- In a Clutter of the Digital made Physical, Tiny Diamonds in the Expanding Ruff - November 12, 2014
