ITS LAST MOVE

Its Last Move

Last Move Curtain shows the artist's signature marbling of enamel and fiberglass over wood.Similar mark-making partitions works on paper, exhibited for the first time as studies for sculptures like Untitled Draped Figure, in which a mannequin head and torso are bound to wooden architecture with ropes of fiberglass and enamel paint. The emergent figure is equal parts Venus de Milo, The Nightmare, Virgin Mary, mother. Inter Gilded Draped Substitution features six irregular stalactite and stalagmite panels, a mine of 23 carat gold, enamel, plaster, and the artist's hallmark beer bottle caps on wood.

The aesthetic phylum of curtains invades Its Last Move like kudzu, at junctures as dense and as violent. In a series of sculptures titled Disco Tray, vintage silver trays are ensconced in a fungal accretion of enamel and plaster. Substance abuse and surface abuse seem to solidify in these examples of domestic body horror, both erotic and grotesque, perverse and affirmative.

Another series, Lamp, wraps the anatomy of freestanding lamps in plaster or fiberglass and candies them in armatures of enamel: lava dark, mutant green, boil pink. Although non-functioning, one is attracted to the gruesome lamps like a moth, a dangerous desire to fry in the uncanny between a familiar silhouette and an untenable surface, between painting and sculpture. Like Melee's former investigations into found household objects, Lamp raises questions of class and associated taste. The series also gestures toward narratives of conflict and neglect. In order to engage pre-linguistic experiences like death and dying, the tenants ofIts Last Move, we employ metaphor. Metaphorization is arguably the last move invited by Melee's artworks and the personal history they beckon.