FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Vice Blog

SHADOW FUX

bmhex, 2010

On Tuesday night one of our favorite film guys (Harmony Korine) and one of our favorite painter ladies (Rita Ackermann) are having a show together at the Swiss Institute. The collaborative effort was created using Harmony's most recent fucked-up but great film, Trash Humpers, as a jumping off point. It's probably going to be sort of strange.

According to the press release, for part of the show Harmony and Rita have taken stills of young bodies from the film and painted over them with old people faces, which is one of the many things that make us think it will probably live up to the rather lofty bizarro bar that Rita and Harmony have set for themselves with their past work.

Advertisement

There will also be two new films from Harmony that complement the paintings and collages. Here's what the gallery has to say about the whole shebang:

Shadow Fux, the artists' first collaborative presentation aims to create a veritable alien, who stalks the viewer from the fringe of the exhibition space. Taking the recent film Trash Humpers (2009) as its point of departure, the exhibition features large scale works in which Ackermann and Korine have collaged, painted, and drawn over stills of the film's beguiling young bodies with old faces. Produced in a call and response method, the collaboration illustrates the importance of cutting to both artists' works. Editing and splicing, Ackermann and Korine insert absurdist moments into narrative tropes, subverting plotlines and ultimately defying our expectations towards story telling. Bmxhex (2010), a towering collage, is composed of two scenes––a redheaded half-figure standing on an abandoned mattress, and, grafted onto it, a quarreler sitting on a BMX, ready to take off. The composition is a phantom for the split personality, which runs throughout the show.

The eerie paintings and their filmic complements are an unyielding monument to the freak, the hysteric, the rake, and the eccentric. In the painting, sekret clubs(2010), a family of coquettish elders emerges from a thick coat of paint, which has been scraped down, reworked, and built up again. This rising ruin finds similarity in an adjacent film, POTS AND PANS (2010), a never before screened work of Korine that documents a deaf Cuban family as they bang on pots in a boozy scene. The lunatic beats ricochet throughout the gallery, while remaining unheard by the players themselves.

Advertisement

We're still not entirely sure how we feel about that alien who will be stalking us while we're walking around the gallery, but the rest of it sounds pretty great. It will probably fall into the category of exhibitions/films that make us feel fucked up and sort of dirty in a really good way. A lot like that one scene from Gummo where the kid is drinking milk and eating spaghetti in the bathtub, member?

Anyway, here's a very small preview of the type of stuff that'll be at the show tomorrow.

It's Showtime Cloaks, 2010

me versus the light, 2010

sekret clubs, 2010

Shadow Fux
Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New York
495 Broadway, 3rd Floor
6pm - 8pm