YASMIN KAYTMAZ

Day of the Locust

Opening Reception: June 1st (6-8pm)

June 1st to July 13th

Start with the flatness of the image, hammered down to an ugly substrate or prototype. Then drive it toward some perimeter of legibility. Now think of the basic structure of a punk song: one or two guitars, bass, drums, some screechy vocals—three verses, a chorus or a bridge. If you can play a three chord progression, you can play a lot of that music. At the core of the genre’s spirit, a paradox: an antisocial outlook packaged into something utterly consumable–easy, dumb music. Think of Sid Vicious spitting on his audience and murdering his girlfriend at the Chelsea Hotel. The music meanwhile is easy to play and easy to like, totally unambiguous. 
 
A few weeks ago Apple released a video ad for the new iPad pro. No new features really, it’s just thinner—their thinnest model to date. The ad dramatized this with a long shot of an automotive press bearing down on a studio apartment’s worth of creative equipment: a metronome, cans of paint, guitars, a mannequin, a violin, multifarious camera equipment, a grand piano. “All I Ever Need Is You”- a cloying early 70’s song recorded by Sonny & Cher plays on a red LP and also gets crushed. The crushing is depicted across several jump cuts, the press leaving behind a rainbow of paint splatter and a shiny new iPad. 
 
When the ad was released, the public was outraged. People really hated it! So much so that the company–occasionally the most valuable in the world–issued an apology to their fans. The craven destruction of all these analog tools wasn’t what they were going for at all, the PR people said. Intended to celebrate the creative industries, the ad prompted commentators in Silicon Valley to describe it on podcasts as bewildering, cruel.. even mildly traumatic. One well-known VC said publicly that the ad had made him cry.
 
In “The Day of the Locust,” a young idiot arrives in Los Angeles to break into the entertainment industry fresh from his Fine Art training at Yale. There he finds work painting sets at a large film studio. The movie swerves into his relationship with a young ingénue who picks up bit parts and dabbles in prostitution. She can’t make peace with this guy’s modest prospects, and mostly friend zones him. An older guy named Homer Simpson meanwhile simps after her and eventually becomes her roommate. A bunch of other characters dance through the madcap and occasionally surreal narrative. The film ends in an orgy of chaos: child murder and mob violence—a poisonous little love letter to Hollywood
 
This show’s not really about any of that, but it comes from similar weather. There are a few recognizable silhouettes, hammered from various metals, including lead, encapsulated in polyurethane. The works are made in groups of three, signifying both multiplicity and a Biblical completeness. Screwed into the wall, a few exhibit stigmata-like puncture wounds. The silhouettes make me think of pop art, but drained of what would make them appealing in a pop sense. Rather, they’re colorless and industrial, even anemic. The only singular work sprawls on the floor like someone threw it there running for the toilet. That one’s not an image or a symbol at all, but a replica of something much more practical. 

-------Boško Blagojević