Contributing Artists

Zachary Hutchison, Katharine Kimmel, Isabelle McGuire, Jake Vogds, Caleb Yono, Allison Zuckerman

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Cannibal Cartoon is a group exhibition that stages the body as a site for exploration. Artists Zachary Hutchinson (BFA 2015), Katharine Kimmel (BFA 2014), Isabelle McGuire (BFA 2016), Jake Vogds (BFA 2014), Caleb Yono (MFA 2015), and Allison Zuckerman (MFA 2015), present paintings, videos and performances taht celebrate perversity and propel confusion between fact and illusion. The resulting show is an exhaultation of intrinisc human behavior mirrored by the Internet. Katharine Kimmel harnesses signs of American leisure, and through bodily gestures humorously tramsforms them into grotesque entities referencing cartoon history. In her videos Cali’s Audition and Knee Babies, Kimmel transforms her hands into the contorted body of a petulant young girl and her legs into two unruly infant children. Her characters speak to girlhood fantasies of fame and thwarted independence brought on by motherhood. Through her humorous approach to art making she tackles challenging issues of female self-esteem. Allison Zuckerman’s enamel and collage paintings infer feminine dread and unquenchable desire. Sorrowing Virgin (Oh, Brad), homage to Roy Lichtenstein “Drowning Girl,” celebrates the melodrama of female sadness; Mother asserts unfulfilled desire and feminine mortalitiy; Fight or Flight reenacts the essentialization of the wild woman archetype fantasy. Through her feminie artitst filter Zuckerman re-represents these iconic portrayals of vulnerable women by men, subverting the male gaze and addressing feminist issues of longing. In an attempt to generate paintings that challenge and inverse the genre’s traditionally masculine history, Calen Yono’s paintings Daughter # 1 and Daughter # 4 and drawing Janus assert a matriarchal lineage. This unusual approach, if taken seriously, asserts new struggles and thus perhaps new freedoms. His video Olympia, references Manet’s painting of the same title, transposes the body of the inarticulate woman with that of a queer male, echoing the reality of sex and identity of the queer male body as hypersexual. The video projection titles What did I come in here fore, what did I hope to find?, quoting Virigina Wolfe from To The Lighthouse, explores melancholia and gender. Through video and performance. Zachary Hutchinson and Isabelle McGuire explore mainstream methods of gendered representations. The duo’s work adopts lazy repetition and multipicity as a mode to fill the void of a capitalist terrain. I’m Not My Selfie and It’s Not Like Me TO Be Me’s cartoon-esque characters continue to fill the space with no intention other than to occupy every inch of it, the artitsts attempt to create a metaphor for the spinning up of a capitalism to a velocity that makes it fall apart. Enthused by the commodity object, Jake Vogds through a psychotic pop-vocalization incessantly reenacts the anxiety and spectacle it generates. He references the speed and triviality of pop, love, and identity. In a video Progression, Vogds creates a twitching ghostly tableau of multiple reproductions of himself in cheerleader drag. A still image, cmbined with a moving image, creates a disjointed and rhythmic chant of progression. Formally the works exhaust themselves in frequency and repetition, employing brilliant application of color and the physiological articulation of teh human form. The array of media presented in the show speaks to the cross-boundary of the contemporary artisitic condition, and to the condition of viral histronic expression the current generation finds itself situated within.