Nature of Things is pleased to present Crying is Just Wet Laughter, an exhibition of painting, sculpture and assemblage by eight artists including The Art Guys (Michael Galbreth and Jack Massing), Stephanie Boone, Steven Charles, Carrie Cook, Joanna Powell, Chris Retsina, and James “Son Ford” Thomas. In Crying is Just Wet Laughter, myths and muggers, cats and skulls, table tops and fingertips (the stuff of life—and the stories people tell to explain it) take on the appearance of a cosmic joke. Red wooden clown noses, masks and wigs punctuate the exhibition with carnivalesque theatricality, while painterly distortions dazzle and disorient with whimsy and wonder. Like any good joke which requires a high degree of ambivalence, the eight featured artists provide ample opportunity for psychic release by skillfully playing with the tension that exists between life and death, joy and grief, violence and pleasure, being and seeming.
Boone’s work leaps heroically into the air of lofty allegories, turning mid-air summersaults around creation myths and memento mori, only to then dive with death-defying acrobatics into the kitschy world of plastic toys and bar-room paraphernalia. Boone’s dare-devilry conjures allusions to the flea-market flirtations of last-century’s Surrealists, juxtaposing the high with the low, the absurd with the serious, in ways that prick the conscience with playful symbolism. Like foolish vandals on a mission to Make Art Great Again, The Art Guys also draw inspiration from the banality of everyday life but do so by detourning—à la Asger Jorn and the Situationist International—found paintings and photographs. Stuck-on red wooden clown noses act like winks and nods, letting the audience in on their follies of inversion.
Interspersed throughout the gallery visitors encounter Thomas’s Mississippi gumbo-clay heads of ordinary people dressed in homespun wigs, and famous ones such as George Washington sporting hot-pink cheeks and cotton-ball hair. Also on display is one of Thomas’s gumbo-clay skulls with real teeth and tin-foil eyes that peers back at visitors like a grotesque reflection from a fun house mirror. A grave digger by day, Thomas knew a thing or two about the human condition and humanity’s inevitable return to the clay, which might explain why he called his portraits “futures.”  With biting social critique reminiscent of James Ensor or Max Beckmann, Retsina’s paintings offer a more dystopian view of humanity and its foibles. As if from an all-too relatable graphic novel, each painting depicts a topsy-turvy scenario featuring fantastically haunting meditations on perennial bugbears such as fear, stupidity, and narcissism.
Charles’s abstract paintings such as The Joy of Swimming Backwards or The Procession of Shadows bring the mood of the exhibition to a fever pitch as oversaturated colors form chaotic layers of pattern and texture that place the viewer’s gaze in a perversely enjoyable headlock. With Your Conscience is a Trick, Charles suggests that delightful deceptions exist within and without the borders of the painter’s stretcher bars. Another kind of perverse joy emanates from Powell’s black and green ceramic cats who wear their colors like loose-fitting costumes. Inspired by 18th century Staffordshire mantlepiece figurines and perched at different locations within the gallery, Powell’s cats become protective deities of laughter whose painted-on smiles consign them, like the circus clown, to be forever cheerful.
With a preference for darker hues and color combinations that carry a touch of maddening magic, Cook’s paintings swell with emotional intensity, complementing humanity’s swinging pendulum of dread and desire, alienation and belonging. Cook’s paintings of half-drunk cocktails suggest the dimly lit haze of early morning when the clocks begin to melt, everyone has left the party, and moments of clarity arise for those who remain. Perhaps, in such a flash of pre-dawn profundity, one might stumble upon the realization that in the world as it is, which is the world turned upside down, crying is just wet laughter.

(text by Max Tolleson)

Artist Bios