Dancing on the Grave
A smash opening confronts the façade of American domestic bliss
This April first, cheerful gallery goers are fooled by inviting pink floors and playful conversation, warm from beers and burritos. At a bustling opening, Arty Nelson’s One Trick Pony presents the domestic work of Edward Givis and Lauren Reynolds in a haunting duo exhibition.
Stepping up to Givis’ first pencil drawing, one is greeted by a cheeky depiction of a doubled woman (or two women) below the waist. A gentle introduction to what is to come, the drawings grow absurd as you follow them deeper into the gallery— with doubled chickens, uncomfortably cropped windows, untied dress shoes, and his familiar screws and shovels, Domestic Grace takes a sweeping lens through American home life.
Mesmerized by his immense skill, it’s easy to look past the creeping undertones in Givis’ work, but as you stare deeper into the scratch-scratch-scratch of graphite on the surface, the drawings are subverted by their own form. Still and cold in black and white, the artist freezes the details of familial life just long enough to reveal the discomfort in their perfection. Accurate down to the nail, you can almost feel the pencil snap under the pressure in the nearly black background of “Untitled” (Chickens) as the birds scream, announcing the eternal return of morning. Pieced together by disjoined snippets, the show vibrates with the confusing pressures of private life— a proximal anxiety for the new father. In form, technique, and composition, Givis paints a picture perfect portrait of domestic anxieties, buried deep in the surface, only coming to by the way of hairs rising on the back of your neck.
Turn the corner from the greyscale drawings and enter the deceivingly vibrant vortex of Lauren Reynolds’ paintings. With bold colors and reduced compositions, you’re pulled in to examine the fine details of these seemingly inviting scenes. On closer inspection, these paintings too subvert their image— a ripped dress, a cracked heart, a missing leg. Once again the artist is the jester and the viewer is the fooled, as domestic scenes turn sour in the back of the throat.
In What Remains Reynolds invites you into her world: one where ghosts of past traumas come back to haunt you. Led by the show’s accompanying zine— the artists’ guidebook to the exhibition— you are taken through the haunted house of her memory to view the landmarks of her history. Imprints of a traumatic past come to life in the form of conjured memories, giving just enough to evoke a feeling. An imprint of her own experience, Reynolds’ paintings leave enough space that the mind wants to fill in the blanks. The house of “All That is Kept Inside” becomes your childhood home, the box in “Privacy is a Privilege, Not a Right” the keeper of your own objects, the peas of “I Can’t Reach” the remains of your own volatile family dinner. In the end, she carves her escape from these hauntings into the surface of “What Remains?”, as flames licking up from below the frame threaten to engulf the key to her freedom.
The densely etched veneer of Givis’ work pushes you away as Reynolds’ sucks you up to get lost inside. Both methodically constructed to near perfection, the two artists’ shows contrast and relate, conversing through their dividing wall about the nostalgia of pasts and present. Beware of what you will find when you dig your fingers into the dirt. For the month of April, One Trick Pony is a graveyard where the lies of our domestic lives are buried.
Photos by Evan McQuaid Bedford