Now Open | David Altmejd at White Cube Mason’s Yard

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

Until 21 January 2023
White Cube Mason’s Yard

The presiding spirit of Altmejd’s exhibition is the hare; the trickster, mischief-maker and shape-shifter found in many world mythologies. On the ground floor of the gallery, a human figure with the ears of a hare sits in a yogic pose in front of a burrow, appearing to have excavated its own substance. In the lower gallery, the trickster’s powers are truly unleashed. A fantastical array of busts and heads features the hare in many forms, from the cartoon-like to the disconcertingly human.

On the ground floor of the gallery we encounter a human figure with the ears of a hare, seated in yogic pose. Its giant ears, stretching almost to the ceiling, seem to probe the limits of the room, while in front of it is a burrow from which the figure appears to have excavated the very matter from which it is made. The contrast of these feet of clay and ears spread like dragonfly wings suggest that a transformation is occurring, from the material to the ethereal.

The Hare is the presiding spirit of the exhibition, whom Altmejd recognises as the Jungian archetype of the Trickster. According to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, our ancestral memories are represented by certain universal themes and roles which appear throughout our literature, art and dreams, and these archetypes can explain our psychology. Trickster is irrational and capricious, a prankster and shapeshifter. He is Hermes, audacious thief and messenger for the Gods, and Loki the gender-switching master of disguise. For the Yoruba he travels between heaven and earth as the contradictory character Eshu, and to First Nations people he is Rabbit, Raven or Coyote, the rule breaker whose mischief brings about change. He surfaces in African-American folk tradition as Br’er Rabbit, and even appears in animated form as Bugs Bunny. The essayist Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World (1998) tracks Trickster into the modern age, subsumed into the role of the artist, and makes a case that this playful, subversive and disruptive force is indispensable to the vitality of our culture.

Altmejd has always sought to absolve his conscious mind from the responsibility of creation, instead attributing his sculptures with their own agency. The crystals he often uses are, in the sculptor’s lexicon, an energy source with which the works are charged, and he has made works featuring multiple hands that appear to clutch and mould at their own substance, just as the seated figure seems to have done. So the Trickster, the mercurial catalyst for transformation, messenger from the subconscious, presented himself as a welcome proxy for the artist, freeing his imagination and spurring it to wilder transformations.

Rowed plinths line the lower gallery, mimicking a classical sculpture court and displaying a fantastical array of bust and heads. Sometimes fragmentary and possibly time-worn, they suggest archaeological finds, parts of animal-headed deities, but might also be extra-terrestrial specimens or the result of genetic experiments. Trickster’s shapeshifting powers are truly unleashed, and we meet the Hare in many forms, from cartoon-like to disconcertingly human. His signature ears, majestically erect, comically jaunty or limp with despair, are semaphore flags signalling emotion: they are reduced to vestigial stumps, exaggerated into sails, and in one case formed from the split carcase of a sperm whale. Caught mid-metamorphosis, an elegant hare grows lizard scales, ears transform to leathery batwings and a belly swells with the sleek black and white curves of a killer whale. The most human of the company are given archetypal designations: The Magician, The Other, Young Man, The Mother. Acting as his own analyst, the artist identifies this crowd of characters as manifestations of different aspects of his personality, allowing us to perceive the exhibition as multi-faceted psychic self-portrait.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.

‘A perfect object for me’, the artist has said, ‘is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time’. Decay exists in balance with regeneration, the exquisite in tandem with the grotesque. The sculpted heads that have been Altmejd’s recent focus provoke that shiver of the uncanny lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality - vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they they share a pair of eyes, or a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope. In others the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but the gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate sensuality in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.

In counter-balance to the aesthetic of profusion is a sculptural impulse to containment and order, evinced in gridded forms and orthogonal mirrored structures recalling Sol Lewitt or Lucas Samaras. Some of Altmejd’s best-known works are his vast, labyrinthine vitrines built of Plexiglas, and often with mirrored elements. They play on the aesthetics of design and display as well as minimalism, but these structures are not simply a means to contain or protect the elements housed within. Rather, the entire structure is an organism or a machine, making visible the processes of growth and decay, generation and destruction that take place inside it. Movement is frozen, but sculptural elements are animated through repetition and incremental change, like the stuttering frames of stop-motion film.

Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making, but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding. His monochrome relief panels are austere in comparison to the heads, focusing our attention on the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. Hands themselves, in cast form, appear and multiply in some of the sculptures, fostering the illusion that the works create themselves. Monumental figures, such as the ‘Bodybuilders’ and the ‘Watchers’, are similarly engaged in their own making or unmaking, sprouting hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies.

David Altmejd was born in Montreal in 1974 and lives and works in Los Angeles. He studied at the University of Québec in Montréal and graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York in 2001. His numerous international exhibitions include a major survey exhibition, Flux, which travelled from Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to MUDAM in Luxembourg and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (2014-15). In 2007 he represented Canada at the 52nd Venice Biennale with his installation The Index, and he was included in the 13th Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2021); the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2008); the Whitney Biennial, New York (2004) and the 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003).