Object of Dread, Castledrone’s latest, intimate exhibition is a series of paintings and performance documentation. The work presents artists Steve Locke and Creighton Baxter as the directors of their own surrealist fever dream.
Although Steve Locke’s Cruising series was created ten years ago the work remains relevant as ever. The peering of the black character toward the audience represents a different kind of oppositional gaze. Walking into the character’s line of sight is reminiscent of an aside from a kitschy sitcom, laugh track and all. In one image, “Break”, he appears to be in a sauna, wearing a suit while the undressed white character eyeing him lounges comfortably. In another, “The Opportunists”, a man stands in a paper bag to hook up in a public bathroom. Each sideways glance is its own language. Each moment is fragile; a precarious scale between joy and destruction. The Opportunists reminds us that we are constantly building technologies against the systems set against us. Dreamy, and masterful, the resulting images exult in the gap between realism (in subject) and abstraction (the atmosphere in which the character finds himself).
Installation view of Object of Dread: Steve Locke and Creighton Baxter on view at Castledrone April 13-June 1, 2018. Courtesy of Castledrone.
Visually and metaphorically each artist’s subtleties become more apparent together. The themes in the work became increasingly urgent as I moved from panel to panel, easily gliding over the possibility of commodified essentialism and cultural anxieties. Locke’s saturated color scheme is the perfect foil against the white cube where Creighton Baxter’s performance documentation takes place.
Vulnerable Evidence was created while Baxter was in residence at Castledrone earlier this year. Through the series of performances, Baxter collapses artistic disciplines—performance, drawing, and sculpture— drawing energy and techniques from all sides in order to give form to this multidimensional piece. Planning the work began through alternating, mediative behaviors: drawing on paper while crafting the small phallic sculptures. The exchange is her practice: nonlinear, oscillating between mediums which inform and interact each other. Can we call it queer futurism?
Installation view of Object of Dread: Steve Locke and Creighton Baxter on view at Castledrone April 13-June 1, 2018. Courtesy of Castledrone.
Though the performance changed throughout the residency, each piece utilizes reverse chronology to discuss déjà rêvé - dreaming, or a premonition, about a future someone, or something, that hasn’t appeared. On the surface, the work seems to function as a play between the present and past. Baxter begins by tracing the room with her eyes and hands while holding the sculptures beneath her shirt, near her sacral chakra— a pool of energy near your abdomen which deals with pleasure and is blocked by guilt. Several performance accessories and actions were replicated throughout the performance. In one image, a horde of dyed gloves Baxter created hung like snake molts; former selves which no longer held gravity. She ends with a repetitive call to the audience (“Will you come closer?”). The crowd that Baxter controlled could never come close enough, recalling the traumas she cradled at the start.
The show itself is a private conversation. Both artists’ work represent an exploration of interiority, rather than identity. Side by side, they discuss the sensation of an uncontainable knowledge; experimenting with the impossible task of translating that which is illegible and improvisational. You, the viewer, are not a friend, just familiar.
Installation view of Object of Dread: Steve Locke and Creighton Baxter on view at Castledrone April 13-June 1, 2018. Courtesy of Castledrone.
