Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Mar 10, 2009

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Doodles, if they aren't of the bubbly lettered or "I Heart So-and-So" variety, are usually weird. Since people often construct them while tending to something else, they can be a glimpse into a person's subconscious — which is why many a weed leaf and naked girl have been scribbled inside notebooks. Chris Kline and Jason Hsu's sculptures have the surreal, daydream-like quality of doodles. Made of cardboard, they are 3- and 4-feet representations of bizarre, comical things — a pink crab riding a skateboard, a sunshine-yellow cactus donning a backward cap, a fat-lipped palm tree smoking a joint.

Devon Dikeou's mixed-media installation is a shrine to Marilyn Monroe, but there isn't a single photograph of the pinup in it. Instead, she takes Monroe's request to be buried in the Italian designer Pucci's clothing seriously — well, as seriously as she can without unearthing her — and creates a 30-foot-long mural mimicking his geometric designs. Dikeou then assembles 36 paintings, which also parrot Pucci's cool-toned, kaleidoscopic works, because Monroe died when she was 36 years old. She tops it off with a shrine-within-a-shrine to Monroe's lover, Joe DiMaggio, by taking five photographs of the American flag while it hung at half-mast to commemorate his death.

In their panoramic photographs, Tetsugo Hyakutake and Daniel Lobdell reveal how enormous the urban landscape is. Capturing at once what our eyes can only see over time, their black-and-white images of sprawling bridges, tunnels and freeways make our machines look monstrous. This is only strengthened by the fact that humans rarely appear in the photographs. In Pathos and Irony: Industrial Still Life in Japan 18 (pictured,) a shipyard sits unmoving beneath the sunrise, with only steel gray monoliths as far as the eye can see.

Shakespeare Undead
On The DL
Just Do It
In The Event That...
Just Do It
Just Do It