Double Take
Double Take, Brewery Projects, LA, 2004
Hollywood Diamond, Derek, Derek and I and I, is a suite of works made for this exhibition. The curator’s premise was to showcase work which considered how art objects are stand-ins for their subject, presenting a certain psychological space between the sign and the signified. I chose to consider the notion of the phallic as emblematic of this dynamic. 'Phallic' serves as a social construction, both clearly defined as related to the phallus, but also ubiquitous in the manor it achieves this end. By this I mean, a building, a woman standing, and a tree trunk, everything can be phallic and also have little relation to the phallus beyond this one social construction. As an omnipresent term, what it conceals and masks is far greater than what it reveals. I presented three takes on this slippage. Hollywood Diamond is a group of four ceramic pods, renderings of a sexy parking lot dividers I saw at a Hollywood grocery store. The second work is a double portrait of a man standing. The third work is another kind of mirrored double portrait, of two abstract forms.
