The Distillery
July 10 2009
Greg Fournier
Julian Wadsworth
Isai Hencia
Morgan Hararay
Mitchell Kehe
I thought Greg was wearing a cape as we approached, but it was just the way the wind was lifting his thin black jacket, the arms of which he had draped over his shoulders as he approached in his wingtips as we rounded the corner and came up upon The Distillery, just off H street in South Boston.
“We we’re just about to go and get some pie,” said the man with the almost fully faded, if I remember correctly its condition, “Pizza” inner lip tattoo; a staple food in his diet for as long as I’ve known him, back when there was still something worth stealing from the Cape Cod or Kingston malls.
“Go walk around inside, we’ll be right back.”
It being the first art show and installation from the guys who bring you Heartthrob, the bimonthly drink and drug fueled orgy, or dance party, that becomes the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, I was almost, then not too surprised at all to find that, despite arriving at opening, a small crowd had already begun to gather in the small space, which made good use of the area allotted it, both allowing individual pieces to stand out on their own, while, and with clear intent, lending in the arrogate, to an overall ambiance, a sense of teamwork and collaboration which inevitably comes in the years now in which some of the contributing artists have been working , both literally and figuratively, side by side; though we had barely made it down the steps and onto the floor before Greg was back, having changed his mind, and we were heading to the flower and vegetable garden off the back of the building to catch up in the grass which I had been over charged for in the park.
Back inside, a metal ramp spiraled down the room and around a well structured Pokemon bed sheet tepee, of Julian Wadsworth’s design, inside of which a VHS tape loop of an upside down shot of that sail boat shaped building in Dubai playing on a television, on top of which sat a blister package of diet pills in variable stages of consumption throughout the night, while a pile of candy lay on the floor, maybe an irreverent invitation to any toting mother looking for a place to drop her deranged inner child.
Though superficially (save the computer generated incest pornography on the postcard sized LCD screen) an illiterate child friendly show; what, with the piled candy, blanket fort, and small mountain of stuffed toys which hopefully kept the child’s attention as mom took in the drawing above them by Greg Fournier, who, with a keen eye for ugly, took and impaled Mickey Mouse on the long diseased ravaged cock of a creature in cartoon flesh tones wearing, if I remember correctly, only wingtips; while floating to the ceiling above, and dripped in a shell of multiple colors of paint, a Teletubby hung from handfuls of party balloons.
Perhaps Isai Hencia’s pictures would be pretty to baby, as mommy read the almost illegible, one had to imagine, stream of consciousness profanity scrawled on the space below the pages where the printer had cut off, all of which were highlighted with a strobe light, a message stipulating that everything is, or was, I suppose, intentional, taped to its top as rest on the floor.
Morgan Hararay’s computer generated visuals, to which those familiar with Heartthrob are accustomed, where represented with their gallery equivalent, I felt, by a bar-code on an otherwise empty pedestal, above which a screen hung, the pedestal as well as a CG bicycle wheel and forks spun, and would vanish off the screen if the video area of the wheel was touched in actual space. While, on the floor beside another pedestal, this one with an old television, the screen of which displayed an evolving computer generated visual image, a printer spit out screen shot after screen shot.
With the show over we took a walk to The Rave Cave, the after-hours space which the Heartthrob collective has kept for a few years now, and which has become quite a staple in the Boston debauchee scene; now undergone a 100 percent makeover in the just over a month since I had been last, and resembling what I could best describe succinctly as what I’d imagine both Jem and Wednesday Adams would come up with after both growing up trisexual swingers, taking a bunch of ecstasy and poppers together one night, then decided to collaborate on a party space/sex dungeon; which lent perfectly to the “What the fuck fucked childhood innocence?” theme of the entire night,…or maybe it was just that the strobe light and title of the show had gotten itself right. Either way it was all broken down by the end into good obscene fun, as the music beat like a cannon so that feet could dance as animal’s until the late hours of the early daylight morning.
