Title: Restore Defaults

Photographer/s: Calvin Lee

Contributor/s: Jenny Drumgoole
Nathan Davis
wacdesignstudo
Hilary A. Baldwin & Mathew Ward

Date of publication: 2011

Place of publication: Brooklyn, NY

Dimensions: 8 3/4″ x 7″

Type of binding: saddle stitch

Number of pages: 24

Number of pictures: 25

Publisher: Carl Gunhouse & Tom Marquet

Designer: Tom Marquet

Editor: Carl Gunhouse & Tom Marquet

Language: English

Category: exhibition catalogue

Price: $10

Summary: The default settings in software are the norms which programmers set as a starting point for all their users. They determine not only how the program will work, but perhaps more importantly, how the user will interact with it. Those preexisting settings which create a working context for artists are the basis for the works in Restore Defaults. These artworks, like all creative efforts, find their origin within a larger social context, be it highway systems, cooking shows, computers, or consumer goods. This clutter of visual and intellectual debris is a fact of life, a necessity and yet a burden to the creative process.

For artistic creation to occur, this information must be sifted and thinned out until there is something of use left. But this kernel is then often worked through, hidden, subverted, or even destroyed before it can be reborn as an original work of art. The artists in Restore Defaults do something different; they take this starting point as, if not exactly their subject, then their object, and these objects persist and structure the works themselves.

This is perhaps most immediately apparent in the work of wacdesignstudio (Scott Cartwright & Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright). Their plan for the Obus Lofts in Houston attempts to redesign the city based on a future of oil and water scarcity. In doing this, they seek to maintain Houston’s most identifiable feature, its freeway system. Their solution, inspired as well by Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus, is to situate massive high rise apartment complexes beneath the freeway system, thus offering future residents a constant reminder of the way of life which led to such scarcity in the first place.

Nathan Davis\’s composition Crawlspace proceeds from his recognition that the very machine which he used to process sounds from other sources was itself generating sound all the while. In this piece, the source of sound and the means of processing it are one and the same. In focusing on the sounds generated by the computer as it goes about a set of ordinary tasks (the spinning of a hard drive, the reading of a disc), he redirects our attention to the constant soundtrack which attends all digital work, and also, by performing tasks on the computer in an order dictated by their sound rather than their utility, uses this found sound as the raw material for his music.

In Jenny Drumgoole’s video work the “found object” of the “Real Women of Philadelphia” website provides not only structure for her video work, but also a context within which it can be received. Initially begun as an effort to win an autographed Paula Deen cookbook for her mother, Drumgoole’s recipe videos take on parallel lives not merely as parodies of cooking shows and diet trends (the ubiquitous “cleanse”), but also as an oblique story of her own life and, even further, her interaction with the community which has assembled around the website, culminating in the video RWoP Glorious Hair, in which she includes, to a parody of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” clips of the many Real Women of Philadelphia mimicking her own signature hair flip, which they had uploaded to YouTube for her use. Of course, the new lyrics are about the very hair flips (and the women performing them) that we are watching as we listen to the song.

Hilary A. Baldwin and Matthew Ward’s collaborations are rooted in both a love of things and a love of doing things to things. In their work, seemingly haphazard accumulations of disparate objects, whether modern furnishings or re-imagined police barriers, or large scale Cheetos combine to create oblique comic narratives, often physically organized to create contexts for the paintings which they also collaboratively create. The paintings hang in an ambiguous relationship to the objects – some sculpture, some simply things, some very nice chairs – which surround them, occasionally reflecting the objects in their own compositions, occasionally seeming to wish they could just have some modernist autonomy and be left alone.

The struggle to transform the swarm of information that reality presents into a coherent artistic idea is never more evident than in Calvin Lee’s photography. In his work, Lee attempts to process reality through a filter of the innumerable images that vie for our attention. This struggle creates a visual residue in his pictures, like smoke lingering in the air. It leaves a sense that before there was this piece of art, there was a starting point, a default.

Book link: www.carlgunhousephoto.com/stuff-for-sale/

Donated by: Carl Gunhouse

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