Featuring: Lutz Bacher, Xavier Cha, Daniel Lefcourt, and Wardell Milan

The four works in Makers - a video, two photographs, and a drawing, let us scrutinize facets of desire - sexual, financial, romantic, and the ever-entwined and exponential combinations thereof. Love, lust and lucre, earnestness and ironic distance, conspire here to encourage and complicate our notions of “making it”.

Lutz Bacher’s Playboys (Watchdogs), a graphite drawing from 1994, is a remake of a pre-existing soft porn image from the 1950’s, originally drawn by Alberto Vargas for Playboy Magazine. The seductress trails two canines and smokes a long cigarette. The snarky caption beside her reads, “They’re watchdogs, Mr. Tate, but I usually don’t let them.” The Playboys series consists of these 48×36 in. drawings as well as larger oils on canvas. Bacher remained true to the spirit of the original material, as each image was executed in an airbrush-like, pulp style. Bacher happened upon a loose-leaf collection of the Vargas drawings while rummaging through a thrift store, and subsequently (in collaboration with the steady hand of a professional illustrator) made them her own. Each layer of appropriation (the found material, its replication, the outsourced artistry) introduces a mysterious kink in our attempt to understand Bacher’s intent, and troubles an attempt at a quick feminist critique.

Xavier Cha’s performance and video, 8:30 AM (2005), inverts a brand of cinematic romanticism into mechanized human clockwork. Cha hired eight actors who formed four male/female couples. She positioned each of the four couples on different corners of the intersection at 53rd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan during the early morning rush hour. Outfitted in appropriate business attire, each couple ardently makes out for approximately 10 minutes as in an exaggerated daily ritual of bidding farewell. For exhibition in the gallery, the resulting 4 channel video installation captures an impossibly symmetrical but seemingly spontaneous configuration—a ritualized, choreographed moment of stylized “passion”. The piece will also be performed on location for five days during this exhibition. From September 12th to the 16th you can go to the intersection of 53rd St. and 5th Ave. at 8:30 am and see the phenomenon for yourself .

Sum (2005) is a deadpan photograph of a hand made gold nugget by Daniel Lefcourt. The twinkling gold orb floats improbably in a vast pitch-black void. The strange, roughly cut, ore seems to have absorbed everything around it, like there’s all kinds of stuff stuffed inside of it and you might be next. It is beautiful and sinister, alluring and repulsive, a portrait of a classic object of desire. Sum neatly encapsulates Lefcourt’s sly critique of commodities, as seen earlier in his Put All Doubt to Rest series of black rocks painted on raw linen, exhibited at Taxter & Spengemann in 2004.

Wardell Milan exhibits Untitled (Love Part 2), a large-scale photograph that is an image of a similarly large-scale diorama. Milan created a three-dimensional tableau in his studio, comprising objects (like a giant cross) as well as cut outs of other photographs (figures from William Eggleston pictures). Within the scene is a portrait of the artist falling from the sky wearing a banner that reads, “you love me not, you love me not.” Milan’s lush landscape compresses and expands time and space, exploiting the photograph’s ability to hold and trigger memories as well as hint at the future. This collapse also mixes up Milan’s personal stories with those of art history, religion, pop culture, and society at large, placing the artist’s practice within the trajectory of those who have come before him.