Art Imitates Life

Davin Watne, the curator of Alias, promised the artists in his show that he would never reveal who they really were. The videographers, photographers, painters, sculptors and other artists assumed other identities to create their work. At the show’s January 16 opening, visitors’ guesses totally missed their marks, Watne says, while the artists could have been standing a few feet away snickering to themselves.

In curating the show, Watne says he was inspired by his observations of how art-world aliases have evolved over the years. “In the past, women and minorities, and in general, marginalized people, have invented new identities in order to have their work taken seriously by those who held sway other their exposure,” he writes in a statement accompanying the show. Judging by the number of minority, foreign and uneducated-artist aliases in this show, what was once seen as a bad thing in the art world is now a good thing. At least two of the aliases are former prostitutes, four were born in other countries and another is in prison. “Contemporary art is searching for these outsider artists. The art world is hungry for exoticism,” Watne says. “We’re from Kansas. We can’t be exotic.” But working under an alias, an artist can be whatever he or she wants to be. It’s too bad the work in this show doesn’t reflect that wide-open range of possibility.

Weirdly, Alias lacks any of the risk-taking one might expect from a group of artists working incognito. Visually, Alias looks a whole lot like all the other shows at the Urban Culture Project’s Bank gallery (with the exception of Your Face’s wearable art show this past December).

The show includes the work of ten local and four national artists. If most of them take any advantage of their hidden identity, it’s to make amateurish and aesthetically dull work while pretending to be untrained artists. For example, “Just Walking,” by someone allegedly named Evelyn Casey Adams, is a roll of 24 black-and-white pictures in cheap, dollar-store frames hanging on the pillar in the center of the gallery. Adams is supposedly a new resident of 3600 Broadway, No. 515. (That’s actually the address of the midtown strip mall that houses Marsh’s Apple Market, a Dollar General and Plasma Donation Services.) She has apparently taken a roundabout walk to the Apple Market with her imaginary neighbor Joe Masterson. The effort, she writes in her artist’s statement, is an attempt to document “the interesting people and places that ensure [her] stability.” The photographs are low-contrast, lucid snapshots of the signs and shopfronts near the intersection of Broadway and Valentine — reference points most midtowners have seen thousands of times but never looked at closely. There’s good reason for that: With the exception of one superbly composed shot of Mr. Masterson carrying shopping bags in front of the grocery store, there’s little to capture the viewer’s attention for longer than a split second. The series could undoubtedly be improved simply by editing out some of the photographs, but that probably wouldn’t have occurred to an unsophisticated artist like Adams. The irony of the situation — that in reality, Adams is most likely an experienced artist — adds little interest to the work.

Many Alias artists decided to experiment with new media. Painters became videographers, and 2-D artists tried their hands at sculpture, all with mixed results. Watne says one artist, a painter from New York City, decided to create a video as a way to make fun of the medium’s too-often highly conceptual and cerebral attitude. The resulting untitled video, reportedly made by a Hooters cook named Lenny Hurch, is one of the best works in the show. Hurch’s Dirty Girlery video-dating service film features an extreme close-up of a sweaty-faced man with a unibrow. To show that he has something more to offer than “his own place and car,” Hurch writes in his artist’s statement, the man in the video is “busting some beats.” He spits, huffs, blows and slurps out a rhythmic ditty that picks up speed as the video plays on. With music reminiscent of a second-grade classroom full of boys making farting noises with their armpits, the piece is a captivating exercise in video editing. Hurch’s statement explains that the dating video is intended to attract “a hot lady who’s into the finer things, like getting eat out,” which adds a grossly funny and downright disturbing bent to the work.

The artists’ statements and bios are more entertaining than the visual art in this show. One gets the feeling that the artists had more fun and used a lot more imagination coming up with their alter egos than they did making the art. In one bio, a photographer who goes by the name of Miracle Don writes that he earned his nickname after surviving a trip through a two-story piece of heavy pulping machinery suffering only two broken bones, some lacerations and the loss of one eye. Meanwhile, studies by OSHA and the MacCurskey Machine Co. showed that there was a .006 percent chance of Don’s survival. This caused him to experience an epiphany. “It is only through loss that one glimpses the here and now,” he writes, “and man’s travails are best told by what he has left behind.” Only after losing his eye did Don gain the wisdom to see more clearly, knowledge he tries to pass on through his photography — some of which is part of pop singer Michael Bolton’s private art collection. Don’s “Absence Is the Only Proof That We Ever Existed” series is vividly colored and textured; particularly beautiful is the photograph of a red-painted ax in a white metal holder attached to a white wall. Some of the ax’s red paint covers the white metal holder, suggesting spilled blood. But for the most part, Don’s soap-opera story is more interesting than his photos.

Similarly, the statement for Crystal K’s art-therapy watercolor drawings and collage recounts a former child prostitute’s Jerry Springer-ish tale of brutal beatings and the death of her “street mother.” Crystal K uses the art-therapy images to, she writes, “explore the things that were good from being a little girl.” She combines simple watercolor pencil-line drawings of early scenes from her life with corresponding cutouts from catalogs. A blond-haired, blue-eyed little girl wearing a pink dress with the words “Birthday Princess” smiles a toothy, saccharine grin from the bottom of one sheet of watercolor paper; Crystal’s watery line drawing of a man watching a girl sit at a table with her cupcake dissipates in the center of the page. Crystal’s drawings are sad, but the creepy perfection in the accompanying catalog images is more evocative than her own autobiographical drawings.

Crystal K’s work hangs next to digital prints by one Harold Brown, whose résumé includes an MFA from the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts and shows at the Walker Arts Center. This accomplished artist mounts his C-prints on foam-core board and arranges them in a panorama. “Untitled (Study for Tropical Storm Isetta #3074)” attempts to deal with, Brown writes, “philosophical speculations about the true nature of reality and the mysterious workings of the universe.”

But the piece just looks like unprofessional digital snapshots of trash on a cheap blue carpet, leading the viewer to question the validity of art that aspires to such a grandiose and unspecific goal.