Recently Chantel Tattoli, an art journalist and reader of ML4U contacted me about Teeth Dreams, a show she covered in Florida. She was really excited and wanted to get the word out about Teeth Dreams, offering to share her pics and writings on her experience and overall take of the show, I happily obliged. Read on to hear and see more...Thanks so much Chantel! - meighan
The Church of Holy Colors is a defunct Baptist church become gallery in Gainesville, Florida. The Church of Holy Colors works in connection with the MILAGROS movement (mainstays are Felici Asteinza, Joey Fillastre, Evan Galbicka), a semipermeable collective bent on ”dismissing the idea of the tortured artist.”
Teeth Dreams is up until August 20th and includes a floor-to-ceiling mural by MILAGROS, oil work by Rachel Rossin, and a dream catcher installation by Johnny Laderer. Viewers are disarmed by the all-over movement of the swirling black-white mural. Effectively, MILAGROS built-in a respite from this shamanic, trippy realm by painting a large pool of blue onto the floor—a sacred color and a nice reference point.
Rossin’s oils, “Being Frank,” deliberately skirt the blind alleys of realism in favor of scenic symbolism. She tells the truth of the matter by way of fictionalized scenes—magical, spirited prospects alive with barking foxes; ripe, fallen fruit; the splayed feathers of coy birds; and pert flora. The paintings say what she means furtively, giving us the emotional gist, but sparing us the details. Rossin then points out the practicality of Magical Realism—as an aesthetic tactic to counter silencing rhetorics. (The Magical Realist style was cultivated in Latin America, ridden as it is with regimes and botched revolutions.)
Laderer’s installation of dream catchers uses materials found on a personal cross-country roadtrip, including: pheasant feathers, giant kelp rope, shards of armadillo carapace, shells, fossilized molars, wild grape vines, a squirrel tail, quartz and turquoise, and beach-combed plastics. The upcycled church lends itself specifically to this installation: the church-gallery mirrors the recontextualization of the dream catchers, what certain North Native Americans applied as mystical shields, and what we imagine to intercept bad dreaming. The catchers dangle everywhere like assertive, in-your-face webs. Laderer seems to contest science’s know-it-all empiricism with the mythos and supernatural models that speak above the logical mind, to the storytelling soul.
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