DUOX4Odells: You'll Know If You Belong, an ode to the legacy of Odell's, the legendary nightclub that still stands today as an aberration of its former self, no longer in use and still maintaining its peculiar facade on North Avenue. Through an installation spanning multiple projections, personal testimonies, and sculpture, Wickerham & Lomax investigate the rich history of the club's years of occupancy from 1976-1992, an attempt at preserving and illuminating its cultural memory in the Station North Arts & Entertainment District and contemporary Baltimore club culture.  Recorded history is fused with the artist's imagination that brings the past into the present where its hardens into a meditation on loss. 

American Medium is proud to presentLocal Atonement: A Nutshell Study of Unexplained Death, Wickerham & Lomax’s first solo show in New York in four years. The exhibition will trace some of the key themes in their 2012 Artists Space show DUOX4Larkin, which concerned the workspace as an articulation of one’s identity and the compulsion to personalize.

“Glessner Lee’s dioramas convey her sense that houses can be false shelters, places carefully furnished to conceal ongoing crimes, lies, suffering, and fury.”

Within a series of large-scale digital paintings are objects that function in dialogue with the televisual—set design, set dressing, and props—while simultaneously challenging traditions of object presentation: the still life, shadow box, and vanitas. The hierarchy of these objects is not based on their utility, but in their ability to assist in manufacturing narrative. It is similar to the contemporary phenomenon of posturing for social media and yearning for the indicator of an experience more than the actual experience itself.

Wickerham & Lomax's ongoing web-based narrative BOY’Dega: Edited4Syndication (since 2014) presents their character Kimbra, whose parents own an antique store. Characters in the BOY’Dega universe are shells (files) for storing various contemporary phenomenon and articulating them through peripheral means. The antiques suggested in these works seem to inherit a contagion, forcing on them some of the bodily aspects of those who have owned them: an old basketball wears a corset, a head continues life in a Ziploc bag, and a severed arm continues drafting a letter of discontent.

“These rooms evoke the incomparable silence of houses whose objects have suddenly and unexpectedly outlived the inhabitants who arranged them.”

The idea of location as character and the insidious aspects of its effects on its occupants lead to notions of escape, the discarded, and identity confusion, all colliding to punish the artists with their own set of iconography. The use of this recurring iconography is a way of running towards obsolescence and rendering these items into antiques. The matters of concealment and distraction are both taken up as forms to depict in a dizzying, yet legible, presentation.

[Quotes from Patricia Storace’s The Shock of the Little]

Selection

October 7–November 9, 2019 / Gillespie Gallery of Art, George Mason University / Fairfax, VA

Mason Exhibitions is pleased to present Selection, an exhibition by Wickerham and Lomax, from October 7 – November 9 in the Gillespie Gallery of Art. For the first time since starting their collaboration almost a decade ago, the Baltimore-based duo present a cross section of their cooperative and multi-faceted studio practice. Paintings, sculptures and elements from previous installations are brought together in a single gallery, offering a unique opportunity to observe how their aesthetic intentions cross-pollinate between projects and reveal some of the major themes of their practice.

Wickerham and Lomax’s work is deeply immersed in the use of digital technologies. To produce their works they use a variety of techniques including digital photography and video, computer generated graphics (CGI), 3-d modeling software, and digital printing. From a research perspective, their practice is akin to an anthropological investigation of digital media’s effects on personal identity, relationships, social codes, and psychic formations. The artists’ are interested in the way physical and digital vocabularies interact and often employ materially unorthodox solutions to produce their objects including: frames for digital paintings that incorporate bird seed or tar and feathers; sculptural tableaux that incorporate digital photographs and collage elements; and photographic surfaces that are often punctured, harnessed, or adorned.

The exhibition’s title, Selection, is both literal and metaphorical. Beyond the act of choosing, in this case works for a retrospective exhibition, the term selection carries with it references to a diverse set of themes and conditions that are conceptually relevant to Wickerham and Lomax’s practice, including: the biological processes of selection in which environmental and genetic influences determine the fitness of organisms and their evolution; digital editing techniques that isolate information for duplication, extraction or manipulation; and social media’s curatorial rituals of liking, friending, and similar mediated forms of individuation or belonging.

The artists explore the ritual aspects of self-expression and group dynamics in a collection of sculptural works which include large-scale fraternity paddles styled in a BDSM-goth fashion and adorned with printed images of birds using bird houses, cages, and feeders. The works’ mixing of references to violent rites of passage, fashion expressive of outsiderness or sexual fetish, and imagery that shows the supplementing of another species through nourishment or confinement, suggest that all community activity, whether mainstream or marginalized, heteronormative or queer, is predicated on familiar codes of dominance and submission, attraction and exclusion, enhancement and restraint.

Related issues of community identity are present in a group of three sculptural tableaux from the project DUOX4Odell’s: You’ll Know if You Belong (2017). These works present monumental photographs of a black male figure styled in disco-futurist attire with silver makeup, bell bottoms, platform shoes and feathers. The images are printed double-sided on plexiglas and have areas of complete transparency outlined by silhouettes of dancing figures or palm trees. Two contain elegiac poems. Together the works act as a fictional but poignant eulogy to the community that inhabited Odell’s, a popular black Baltimore nightclub during the disco era. The monumental figures can be read as spectral emblems of the no longer existing dance club. They embody the projective power and performative pleasures of self-presentation with its’ emphasis on surfaces, poses, and fashions, while also suggesting a longing for an absent community of like-minded revelers.

The exhibition also includes a variety of the artists’ signature fetishistically embellished digital paintings, many of which challenge the expectations of traditional painting idioms such as the vanitas still-life and the self-portrait. In such works, the artists’ balance compositional restraints – such as the provisional display conventions of urban store windows (complete with neon border text and pegboard backgrounds), or the portrait restrictions of identifying documents, such as passport’s deadpan indexical format – against a profusion of digital objects, coded references, and (sub)cultural bricolage layered and strewn across the image surface. This formal tension between the banality of institutional or commercial structures, and the hyper-articulated lexicon of ephemera, text fragments, and hermetic images that populate their surfaces, point to the ways our digitally augmented identities and desires, which are often dictated by the conventions of technology, functionality, and commerce, also contain the potential for liberated forms of personalization, social engagement, and speculative world-building.

“Our work is made in discrete bodies but always with the memory of what we made before and how each body of work might live together in the future. Now that we have the opportunity at GMU, it will be exciting to see all the employed strategies at play; the evolution of visual tropes, the prioritization of the margins, and our interest in social forms creating new realities and contradictions.” – W&L

In Boy'dega the ensemble cast is an oscillating extension of its lead actor and becomes a metaphor for community and family. In the televisual web series its made explicit due to the ability to inhabit his body. He is a vessel and his friends become technologies extending his person. The lines of character, fan, author and actor gain fluidity to talk about the aims of successful collaboration. Girth Proof is an investigative stance on a subculture that talks about notions of access and exclusivity based on one's body-image. It explores things about ways one becomes disassociated from the group or find various points across its spectrum while still using narrative and the language of television as an investigative tool. We have deliberately chosen frats as the follow up social group to explore because the conversation has a dual implication in this work as both a homo erotic gesture, and a conversation around sexual violence whether through rape or hazing.
We wanted to design a project that could allow all these groups represented through forms to function in the same space as well as work towards the ways they imbue and complicate each other's narratives down the line.

DUOX function's like a fast fashion brand (H&M) overlaying themselves and their methods onto Larkin Soap, a defunct company from the 19th Century. Adopting some old ideas and stretching others to an extreme, new productions emerge. Male Pregnancy, XL Look Books and The Gift Bags for all.

DUOX4Larkin draws on the historical example of the Larkin Company, a now defunct soap and home decorations company founded in the 19th Century. Housed in an administrative building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Larkin achieved notoriety for its endeavors to promote harmonious working conditions and “pure” values amongst its workforce, in synthesis with the purveyance of lifestyle solutions to its customers. Considering Larkin as a prescient Gesamstkunstwerk of branded product and corporate values, DUOX4Larkin incorporates arrangements of objects and images that relate to the changed notion of labor - overly designed and dysfunctional workstations, detoured workwear, customized commodities, and the use of screens for both display and concealment. The physical qualities of DUOX’s work in which related elements indicate hierarchies of “the simulated” and “the real”, build on the application of physiological ideals of cleanliness and hygiene within contemporary culture. Underlying processes of customization suggest both the standardizing of aesthetic choice, and its extension into the realm of biopolitics. The composite inhabitant of their workspaces is part health worker, part surrogate parent, part fashion victim.

July 12–August 1, 2018 / Reginald F. Lewis Museum / Baltimore, MD

Channel Heal: The Writer’s Room is a work intended to survey various metaphysical phenomena and explore their use as correctives to conflict and trauma. The phenomena engaged in this exhibition include: physicality (the physical attributes of a person); mysticality (relating to the spiritual or symbolic), egotism (excessive focus on the self), and transcendence (going beyond ordinary limits).

Wickerham & Lomax have transformed The Reginald F. Lewis lab space into a writer’s room, a stage, where themes will be discussed and collected as reference material for a future endeavor entitled Channel Heal – a video platform chronicling various Baltimore creatives in their transgressive acts – acts that may go beyond established limits or boundaries. On display are newly fabricated pieces that are aberrations of objects typically used by those in the film and television industry. Dry erase boards, clocks, and post-it notes are sample props of the televisual writer, and in this exhibition they crystallize or define moments that would either be provisional or serve to transform the thoughts, ideas, and gestures into an artwork.

The artists work in the space of complicating binary oppositions – virtual vs. real, individual vs. group, and narrative vs. nonsensical. In this exhibition the installation and subsequent programs work in tandem to present both platform and action as a way of externalizing thoughts on conflict and trauma. Ultimately they will be transitioned into form.