It was hot despite the fans running inside and the door was wide open to account for the crowd spilling out onto the street. I felt really happy for all these people I didn’t talk to. They were having a grand time because there was this novel concept called free wine at Ridgewood’s Lorimoto Gallery (16-23 Hancock St.), where Angel Archives Collective hosted their PSYCHOSPHERE exhibit.

The exhibit promised to showcase the “psychic communion of all beings,” but I didn’t see a shared understanding of the collective consciousness. Instead, artists shared in attempting to describe their own consciousness. Lonely condition, or the condition itself, there was work done at Lorimoto to define what it means to observe one’s self living. 

The exhibit surveyed multiple mediums: paint, video, sculpture, a roll of toilet paper that read in hostage font, “the fact that we feel so connected to our physical form is a terrifying metric to view the body,” before going on in run-ons about a pair of shoes and the callouses guarding bone and softer skins against them.

A full survey would be another run-on, so I’ll focus only on a few.

Emma Long’s Spore (mixed media sculpture) and Liz Roff’s Unapologetically Present (charcoal on canvas) present as womb and cradle, respectively. Spore depicts a cocoon whose skin is patterned like dried moth wings, cured tobacco, or elderly skin. It makes me think of the skin on my grandfather’s forearms, how soft and tissue thin it was, how I could reach out and touch it, and now how I can’t recall what led me to do that. The cocoon is in a vacuum, surrounded by seemingly untreated canvas. Out of the canvas and into the world, this is the very beginning, just after nothing.

Liz Roff’s Unapologetically Present encloses a bird’s nest-like cradle inside what might be a cupped leaf. Like a raft, the child inside, not yet arrived, will not drown in any lake. Delicate, defensive: life is fragile but one is often lucky enough to be defended.

They both depict protective apparati from which one grows or is born. We wake up every day and come to realize we’ve become again. We are all watching each other grow up.

After that and into adulthood, life becomes a pileup, a totem testament to which is Jacob Frederick Hartman’s Get a Handle on Your Life (mixed media).

It centers a portrait of a red, bucktoothed face caught in shock. Wings of unlit matches—anchored by cabinet hinges—frame the portrait, which is crowned by a child’s sippy cup. Childhood and the fire: damage will accumulate and leave you as dumbstruck as the portrait. Quit cigarettes or arson and be left with the matches you bought for a future where you always imagined yourself as a degenerate. Propelled into the present, where you’re coming up short: a scratched-out lotto ticket, another small loss. Another day that leaves you feeling disassembled (the chunk of cabinet or drawer or wherever the hinges came from, on which the scratch-off is fastened).

And it’s all obvious to everyone around. There are receipts as there are on social media and in social spheres: we’re all taking one of the many pull-off tabs that read, “GET A GRIP ON YOUR LIFE” which reformat the phone numbers on the bottom of flyers into a statement to one’s self, rather than a reaching out for service work.

With so many tabs taken and still remaining when I passed by, it seems like it’s the whole world that’s boned. The only distinction is whether or not one’s in the know. We all screwed our pooches so uniquely and ended up in the same dive-asylum, piled up like so much junk.

The collage-as-totem is the material form of our era. So many hands, at the factory or in the studio, took part in it. So many found pieces, recontextualized, elude meaning. It breaks the illusion of a determined, thoughtful artist, in the same way the illusion of a highly ordered algorithmic feed generates nauseating sequences of gore, buy-this-yesterday, FOMO, and pictures of your aunt. The artist’s sequencing only puts together a thousand and one pieces from a thousand different puzzles. It won’t all fit together. It appears arbitrary because it is.

Life begins so neatly, but becomes the junk drawer and thrift store: everything sold separately, the signs pile up like people in cities. Eight and a half million people around here, each meaning something distinct; dozens of pieces at Lorimoto, doing the same, coming into life alone, together.

Photos courtesy of MariLuz Jimenez and Angel Archives.

Angel Archives Collective’s PSYCHOSPHERE was held on May 29th and the 30th. Follow them on Instagram for more updates.

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