Chris Lawrence’s installation Ultracoital Oasis at Extra Extra [September 10-28, 2010] is the work of one depraved do-it-yourselfer. The artist very effectively assembles materials of the type you find at Home Depot—but not at all according to the DIY guidebook.
At the center is Incubator, a kind of sinister sawhorse. Partly embedded in the wall, the piece aims a splintered board directly at your skull. A knot of electrical wires droops from its pointy head and a pair of cement blocks weigh its flanks like saddle bags. In a note repeated throughout the show, Lawrence embedded lights in the blocks—shooting an eerie fluorescent glow through the piece.
Spreading that glow over the floor is Torches, a set of candle-topped flashlights connected again by a tangle of wires. The inexplicable redundancy of candle-over-battery-over-electric cord evinces a primitive misunderstanding of technology, like lighting a campfire inside an airplane to take care of a chill. More than preparing for blackout, these lights seem to forget how things worked in the first place.
Look up and you see the star of the show, Moth/Flame—a buzzing fan dangling by an electrical cord. Like Hop-Frog in the Poe story, this impish dwarf swings balefully over jittery guests, powered by its own momentum and the vicissitudes of the room’s air currents. Moth/Flame also carries a fluorescent bulb, its light darting to and fro as the piece careens through the air.
The collective backlight of each peace adds up to a half-light in the room, leaving a dark void between the works. Viewers inhabit this persistently unlit and unfinished place, a state made more vexing by the handyman’s willful incompetence. Boards are splintered, electrical cables lead nowhere, and hazards dangle above our heads. Ultracoital Oasis is really futzing-around hell, an urban pioneer’s nightmare of incompletion.
