It’s boys versus girls for two installations at Vanderbilt University’s Space 204
The latest exhibits at Space 204 are both sprawling installations that speak to one another with an uncommon energy. While curators try to program complimentary work by artists showing side-by-side, it’s rare to see a pair of shows define one another as directly as these two.
The central image in Mara Sprafkin’s installation is a girl holding a pineapple on a platter. She stares at it pensively, her pursed lips rendered with a single small dot. The subject is the artist herself and the numerous iterations of the self portrait are presented on a cacophonous array of brightly colored paper: pink, purple, yellow, orange. Larger pieces of paper present much bigger and much smaller renditions of the same self portrait in various compositions set against checkerboard designs of diamond shapes, that alternate colors in the same vibrant palette as the rest of the show. In total, the installation includes nearly 1600 prints and drawings.
As with much of Sprafkin’s work, She Would Have Thought Twice, Possibly Three Times resonates with themes addressing femininity, sexuality and the manner in which women are perceived by men as well as by one another. Sprafkin use of scrapbooking and craft materials brings a context to these messages. The self portrait and the show’s title may make a funny comment about diet and body image, implying that the girl may be contemplating devouring the pineapple. On a more serious note, the pineapple has long symbolized hospitality, and Sprafkin’s fruit could represent the still-often-expected domestic duties that women may take on in their roles as wives and mothers. The installation offers more questions than it answers, which is great, and it’s worth the trip just to gaze at Sprafkin’s grand, gorgeous display.
Justin Farris Braun’s They See Themselves from the Inside is an impressive installation consisting of two large structures fashioned out of black painted lengths of 1” x 2” lumber, lashed together with black electrical tape. The same tape – along with blue painter’s tape – haphazardly decorates the gallery’s walls. Another display of wooden slats makes an appearance along one wall. A separate-seeming trio of color photographs printed on transparent plexiglass are lit from behind by banks of fluorescent lights.
Visitors can actually weave their way in and out of Braun’s precarious looking structures, following the black grip tape that outlines its footprint on the floor, creating a design that calls to mind a schematic drawing or a circuit board. The installation has a purposely slapdash aesthetic and where Sprafkin’s show bursts with colorful feminity, Braun’s monochrome makings brood like a monument to that part of the male psyche that poet Robert Bly has referred to as the “terminal adolescent.”
Braun’s second structure is similar but it features a disassembled stairway handrail and banisters leaning in a corner where bottles of wine and liquor are sitting on the floor. A few of the banisters have been integrated into the construction itself which, in this case, is holding up two massive black blocks high above viewer’s heads. Again, the structure seems to speak to a self-destructiveness peculiar to males that finds egoic grandstanding ambivalently shot through with insecurity and self-sabotage. I love the look of these structures and genuinely felt a bit of anxiety walking through them, but I wish Braun would have put in a little extra time touching up his large, balancing blocks with black paint. The spots where the poles enter the blocks had been worn away to reveal that they were made of what looks like plain, white Styrofoam. It’s not a tragedy, but a bit more attention to detail might have pushed this installation into feeling truly dangerous. I’m a guy. Guys like danger.
