Hysterical Body
HYSTERICAL BODY
Frank Castanien | AJ Fusco | Charles Sommer
No Place Gallery, 10.06.17 - 10.27.17
Curator: James McDevitt-Stredney
HYSTERICAL BODY‘s title is taken from a John Maus rant on YouTube:
“What I’m trying to do is appear as something else than the world as it stands, because I believe that’s what we all really want, is to see one another and be seen, and my particular wager is that the hysterical body is perhaps exemplary in its affirmation of that.”
“Hysteria,” in Webster, is a “psychoneurosis marked by emotional excitability” as well as a “behavior exhibiting overwhelming or unmanageable fear or emotional excess.” Hysteria comes to us from the ancient Greek root hystera, meaning uterus, and was associated, by Plato and Aretaeus, with a “wandering womb” which had a separate life within the woman: “an animal within an animal.”
Therefore, hysteria has always been marked by notions of gender and embodied experience. In No Place Gallery’s HYSTERICAL BODY exhibition featuring the work of Frank Castanien, AJ Fusco, and Charles Sommer, the outmoded cultural lineage of hysteria is queered and recast in outer space, where the utopian promises of sci-fi writers like Octavia Butler and Ursula K. Leguin found purchase. In space, the body is still a prison, but no one is there to insist you’re being hysterical, even if you are hypoxic from space sickness. The aesthetic conventions of “outer space” provides a visual metaphor for an inner psychological space to be found outside of the psychic colonies capitalist society has erected within our minds, which thwart our ability to be, and be seen, as our real selves in the social-visual plane.
Frank Castanien (b.1989; Marion, OH) is an artist and poet based in New York City, NY, and Vienna, Austria, who graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2011. Castanien’s plexi, vinyl decaled, and spray painted jigsaw sculptures contrast obsidian with fluorescents to create otherworldly, cartoonish creatures caught between expressions of torturous agony and le petit mort ecstasy of orgasm. The two standing genderfuck sculptures are marked by diverging sexually dimorphic characteristics, standing atop phalluses that cum Warhol flowers. Castanien’s wall sculpture, meanwhile, freezes a psyche split by two inverse identities, recalling the dysphoria in the name of the band Against Me!
AJ Fusco (b. 1984; Columbus, OH) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Fusco previously lived at Skylab Gallery. His finely wrought, large-scale graphite drawings retain visual elements derived from H.R. Giger, The Matrix, or even The Next Generation’s Borg, while excising all representational genre references. Fusco’s delicate drawings are abstractions of psychological horror that compel us to stare into their abyss. After prolonged exposure, the viewer is left with a similar dread as that provoked by Martin Vaughn-James in his inscrutable 1975 graphic novel The Cage.
Charles Sommer (b.1989; New Jersey) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program. Sommer’s pictorial vocabulary draws on STEM field diagrams and charts; 1980s trapper keeper aesthetics; and visionary depictions of what multiple dimensions and other worlds might look like. His brilliant red cadmium B-movie landscape offers a nostalgic view of the future from the position of the past while his mural encompassing the eastern and southern walls of the gallery asks us to envision even our place in the present anew - whether that is the 2-D space of a painting, the 3-D space of the gallery, the 4-D space of cosmic time, or the unlimited dimensions that string theory and the simulation hypothesis force us to contemplate.
Text by James Payne
