Leckermaul
Leckermaul is a black metal pastoral exhibition of paintings, a sculptural installation of approximately one hundred cast plaster plates permeated with toasted blue cheese, and two resin cast beetles. In the paintings, landscape and still-life are pushed beyond delicate vistas of foliage into an ever-compressing constellation of cultural debris. Using ecologies of anthropocentric consumerism, Carey-Sheppard transfigures foreground, middleground, and background into the bits, bobs and bytes of a collapsed subject-object relationship.
Caught within this fluctuating relationship, our lives and bodies are both landscapes and still-lives, genre painting for 21st century microorganisms and tableaux vivants for a supra consciousness.
It is the bionomics of the damp warmth of summer humus, transposed against the dry brittle landscape and the sweet smell of rot coming anew.
Vultures made a roost on a school once. The school is an old Victorian house perched on a small hill on the outskirts of town. In the morning it was something like coming to a haunted castle.
How could one not be obsessed with landscape and still-life if at times a flower is more like Mount Everest than Mount Everest could ever be? And just because you can't see an orange cat without also thinking about lasagna doesn't mean everything is equal. Taking feverish joy in the recesses of the phenomenal world and holding it with a terrible kindness, with the kind of love that takes the warts and all.
The metastructure for the show is a spiral, like a vulture swirling in the sky in pursuit of lunch. The exhibition is a line circling around and around a picnic; as the spiral grows it’s still centered on the meal but doesn’t limit itself— a vulture is always a bit hungry after all. The works are similar little loci of coiled networks, touching on leisure, children’s collections of rocks and sticks, storytelling, birding, with the darker things that come from these locations: dump sites for murderers, ecological failure, existential threats of all sorts.
Spirals Yes Spirals
**Rosina Leckermaul is the name of the witch in Engelbert Humperdinck's operatic retelling of Hansel and Gretel (premiered December 23rd 1893). Leckermaul: “sweet tooth”
SE Cooper Contemporary
July 20th - September 7th, 2024
6901 SE 110th AVE Portland, OR 97266
info@secoopercontemporary.com