BAD MANTRAS
Nathaniel Mellors & Erkka Nissinen
June 7 – July 20, 2019
Opening reception: Friday, June 7, 6 PM – 9 PM
“BAD MANTRAS by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen, Mellors’ second exhibition at The Box, is a dark satire of contemporary western politics and cultural assumption. We enter a space/time k-hole/black-hole where autocracy and corruption has led to a world of dysfunction and absurd inversion…
…Where humans are subjugated to puppets and a giant talking egg is GOD.
…Where nationalism manifests in cosmic/comic acts and the world is remade as just one country … FINLAND.
…Where liberal-democracy has become a terrified technocratic autocracy and to make matters worse the God-like creators of Planet Finland will be back any moment now to check-in on the culture they think they’ve created…
This may not go so well.
At the core of Mellors and Nissinen’s exhibition is The Aalto Natives, a project originally conceived for the Finland Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale. This is a comedy which fuses creation mythology and religion with contemporary themes through the archetypal narrative of Atum and Geb, the father and son creators of “New Finland”. Atum and Geb – a talking egg and talking cardboard box – exist in the gallery as animatronic sculptures, interacting with the video projections, through which we experience their mock-epic narrative. The Box will show The Aaltos Natives (Floored version), which was exhibited in Mellor’s solo exhibition, Progressive Rocks, at the New Museum in 2018. This work is a sculptural amalgamation of Atum and Geb: multiple projections shoot from their heads and limbs, floating images of the film around the room and encouraging the viewer to move about the space and objectify the sculptural bodies.
The current political and cultural situation in the U.S.A. intertwines crooked corporate dealings, infantile political activity and the hermetic mediation of reality through social media and the news cycle – we experience the apparently permanent extension of the dominant power structure and its inverse – the new underclass – a growth beneath the belly of ownership. In The Aalto Natives, all the characters living outside of the technocratic political super-structure are subject to misery and mutation. They sing songs about it, and some have resorted to performance art. This work mirrors the scenes and situations we see increasingly manifesting in the world.
In narrative dialogue with The Aalto Natives storyline, the exhibition presents two new works: Presidential Crucifixion (2019) and Bad Mantras (2019). Presidential Crucifixion features The President of Finland puppet, with a spherical head and long tentacle-like arms, and mounts him to the wall as a totemic sacrifice. The projected film upon him both glorifies and degrades him at the same time. Bad Mantras isa felt sculpture of the mangled Transcendental Accident character from The Aalto Natives. The Transcendental Accident has no centralized body but multiple-heads and long limbs reaching out and improvising with various musical instruments. It’s performing, it’s singing … it’s a sculpture trying to transcend its own objectification.
The humor and playful visual tone of Mellors and Nissinen’s work highlights the moral complexity of our intense political and environmental issues. The Box is excited to bring these works to their first showing on the west coast at a time of broad social and political vulnerability and to invite the viewer to enjoy the work’s humor and use it as a vehicle to encourage reflection.” – per website
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