Double Take: Lindsay Preston Zappas, I Forgot My Shoes
by :
Andrea Mancuso & Shelley Adler
Lindsay Preston Zappas, I Forgot My Shoes, installation views from the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. Photos: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Take 1: Andrea Mancuso
Approaching the gallery, my first challenge is to find a way in, one heavy garage door is shut tight, but the other one is open at the bottom, and allows me a view of disembodied ankles, feet, and some legs of the folks standing inside. After deciding against entering through the crawlspace I use the clearly marked office door to this remodeled body shop turned gallery. Inside, I am embraced by an urban camouflage. Colorful filtered light reflects on painted gallery walls, from green to purple to orange. Lindsay Preston Zappas’ show I Forgot My Shoes at the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA) is unconventional work in an unconventional space. The show is an invitation to get lost on an art safari of photography, tapestry, and sculptural seating. Like an opening in a canopy of trees, entering the gallery is a warm welcome to Zappas’ full-spectrum tropical world.
The gallery is set up with three primary walls, each wall painted in two tones of a different color—light backgrounds filled with large carefully placed curvilinear shapes. The shapes change in color from wall to wall but form continuous silhouettes at the joined corners. These backgrounds create a landscape of spectral camouflage that surround and interact with the more formally framed photographs and hanging woven artwork on the walls. Light from outside fills the space, filtering through translucent photographs that Zappas has used to cover the garage door windows. The large scale vinyl photograph depicts intertwined and clean-shaven arms and legs, colorful weavings, and fringe.
Zappas artwork takes us through a two-dimensional world that we are encouraged to enter visually and physically. Part tapestry and part costume, the hanging woven works have openings for arms and legs that invite the viewer to imagine what it would be like to embrace or be embraced by the weavings. The weavings jumble together raw wool, and mismatched colorful yarns, topographic relief maps of a sensual world of materials. A performance at the opening of the exhibition had performers enact the works: they stood partially hidden, behind the large-size weavings, their arms and legs coming through the proportioned holes, slowly moving, caressing, and animating the two-dimensional works. Despite the absence of the performers during normal gallery hours, Zappas weavings translate their life-size scale into an invitation to connect with the viewer with titles like Weaving For a Body (Tuft and Eyes) (all works 2019).
Large photographic works on each of the three gallery walls act like an instruction manual, demonstrating the ways in which bodies and Zappas’ paintings could be meshed together. In the photographs, bodies are again partially obscured with pelt-like fabric painted with abstract rainbow-colored splotches and marked with black leopard spots. We see an occasional butt crack, an extended arm, a hand Photoshopped to repeat in a row. The figures are white, anonymous, and their faces are covered by the same round seat cushions that top the stool sculptures in the gallery. In Zappas’ world the human figure is treated on the same playing field as the paintings and the tapestries: it’s all one big phantasmagoric biome.
The artist’s work is indicative of a new-wave of art-making, an art practice that is not settled in one medium or material but ties together an object ontology connecting, say, the Surrealists’ found objects, Kente cloth weaving, and meticulous studio photographs. These disparate practices could make the exhibition feel fragmented, but the visual unity of the work pulls these cultural signifiers together, like a walk through a tropical forest. Zappas leaves trail markers to help us find our way, and we can play peek-a-boo as in Jim Hodges’ metal and camouflage sculpture, look and see (2005), a Buffalo fixture now made public art. Zappas’ mix of weaving and photographs is like a mash-up of photographer Dinh Q Le’s elaborate photo weavings with the colorfully-patterned fabric artist Eric Mack’s installations. Zappas’s work could be considered an exemplar of this new materialist aesthetic that offers opportunities for expanded interpretations of materials and objects and our relationship with them.
Zappas’ colorful works and tapestries at BICA are hidden in plain sight, camouflaged for visibility. The work is playful but liminal, expanding and compressing the two-dimensional frame, from sculpture, to tapestry, to photographs, to film on the windows. A flat playing field of arms, weavings, wood, and gallery walls. All of the materials, like all of the subjects, are treated equally, subbing in for each other across the work; this ambiguity is refreshingly disorienting. The short cushioned stools are inviting but not quite furniture, you literally become part of Zappas’ forest floor when you sit on them.
Lindsay Preston Zappas’ show I Forgot My Shoes is refreshing and on-brand for BICA, a new art center whose mission is to “to break down the barriers between the art world and the rest of the world.” Zappas’ show encourages the visitor to be an explorer of the gallery and embrace and traverse her speculative fictitious landscape.
Lindsay Preston Zappas, Painted Props (Hand Symbols). Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez
Take 2: Shelley Adler
I love it when people do several things well. Lots of people don’t like that but I do. For example, it pisses off the gatekeepers—whoever they are—when an artist can make good art and can write well about art. I guess it threatens their job or their authority or their corner of the market. My teachers in art school used to say, “Just do your work and leave the rest for the writers or critics.” But what if you’re a better writer than the so-called art writers? What if you have multiple interests and can do more than one thing well? Like also be a really good gallerist or business person or mother as well as an artist? What then? (I always say that the world can accept artists who are bad fathers, but not artists who are bad mothers. But that is another story.) I for one, love those artists that can do it all. Enter Lindsay Preston Zappas.
Zappas is an artist originally from San Diego. When she relocated to Los Angeles she decided to lend her voice to an area in the L.A. art scene she felt was lacking—good quality art dialogue and reviews, conversations and interviews that focused on the corner of the artworld that interested her as an artist. So, she started a free quarterly magazine, together with an online platform and podcast, about what’s going on in the L.A. art scene. It’s not unusual for an outsider to come to a new city and see what’s missing. Zappas’ platform is called Carla—Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. She has a lot to say.
But there is also Lindsay Preston Zappas, the artist. She was invited to show at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA), a new contemporary art space in a converted garage in Allentown, just north of downtown Buffalo. Zappas pulled out all the stops in putting on this exhibition, titled I Forgot My Shoes; the works include live performance, photography, furniture, and weavings, all in a space she painted with puffy cloud-like forms on the walls. The primary focus of the show are the seven wall-based works, including an enormous 18-part photograph installed on the exterior of the building.
The three prints hanging inside are composite photographs of naked body parts and lots of hands pointing in different directions. You get the impression that Zappas is telling you something, pointing something out to you, with all the finger movement and bodily gestures, but the artist prefers to leave the interpretation open-ended. It is evident, however, that for Zappas, the body is very important. In her photographs, the naked body is surrounded by a colorful, abstract world, made of weavings and painted wooden forms. At the opening for the exhibition, viewers were treated to a performance of live performers inserted into Zappas’ wall-mounted tapestries. Arms and legs protruded from the weavings with a deep sensuality in the naked skin in contact with the soft texture of the colorful material. The performers moved very, very slowly and if you weren’t paying attention you might have been caught totally off-guard and spilled your drink. The weavings themselves are mini celebrations of color, texture, and abstract composition.
All the work in the show felt like it was part of one thing split into many parts, each of the components relating to each other across the various mediums. The puffy cloud shapes painted on the walls could be found in the details of the highly colorful weavings which were supported by wooden structures that interact with the body in the photographs. The photographs also feature the furniture which is positioned around the BICA gallery space. There’s a sense of 3D-collage to the exhibition, with everything overlapping and falling into each other, making it so easy to enjoy and so easy to get lost in.
The title of the exhibition I Forgot My Shoes refers to an event from the artist’s childhood when her brother literally forgot to bring his shoes to school and the subsequent embarrassment he felt. The idea of forgetting your shoes leads Zappas to more general and far-reaching issues that deal with clothing, costume, and vulnerability. How does dress determine our place? Does our dress give us away? The simple suggestion unpacks relevant ideas for our time in a playful and obtuse way.
It was one of my favorite twentieth-century philosophers and teachers, AJ Heschel, who, when asked about advice for living a good life said, “Live your life as if it were a work of art.” I love that idea of wholeness and creativity. There’s no need to choose what talents to use, if you’ve got them, use them all! So, if you happen to be a great business person and artist—go for it. If you happen to be a musician and actor and painter, well, all the power to you. And if you happen to be Zappas, you will actually live in your work of art: many of the body parts in the photographs are hers. She’s really there on the inside and, lucky for us, here on the outside too.
Andrea Mancuso is a curator, educator, and artist known for her work in the Buffalo-based artist collaborative virocode.
Shelley Adler is an artist living and working in Toronto, Canada. She is represented in Toronto by Nicholas Metivier Gallery.
Editorial Note:
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art is also the publisher of this magazine. In this issue of Cornelia we didn’t exert any editorial control about what writers chose to cover. When two writers covered the same show - and it was the show in our own gallery - we were left with a tough choice. We decided that both writers took the time to write interesting reviews of the show that cover different perspectives and that it would be unfair to them to not publish their work. We promise it won’t happen again!
Lindsay Preston Zappas: I Forgot My Shoes
June 14 - September 7, 2019
The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art
324 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo NY 14222
thebica.org
