The exhibition will consist of over a dozen new large-scale works, including seven printed acrylic panels suspended within rakish, jungle-gym-like metal scaffolds. Printed on both sides and riddled with cutaway shapes, these new works resemble holiday advent calendars whose visual lexis depicts a hallucinatory, non-Newtonian home interior wherein family pets and furniture trade appendages freely and the dialectics of the household—intimate vs. public, guileless vs. dirty, protected vs. exposed—invert themselves freely like deep sea creatures. A new series of paintings will surround these assemblages, which will further attempt to contain the duo’s QT (quarantine) fugue state—with the picture plane full of extrusions, attachments, plug-ins and portals, as if in the middle of a machinic transformation or a system-wide breakdown.

November 22, 2019–January 12, 2020 / CulturalDC, Mobile Arts / Washington, DC

For part one of the Time Capsule exhibition, Wickerham & Lomax begin an examination of the spirit with which the American public confronts the American Dream.

The referencing of the entrepreneur and the creative existing in contemporary Baltimore has been positioned under a subversive lens which draws from aspects of American portraiture.

How does one render success? The artist’s answer is presenting their images in a square aspect ratio common to the iconic Instagram post. Models are dressed in a t-shirt collection and manipulated suits, the regalia of casual, corporate America. Images are framed in motifs associated with the presidential, the hustler, the commodity and the fictional—asking the viewer what archetype they embody.

“Velks Reflect/ Child Birth,” the poem present in the space as an introduction to a published collection, centers around an alien couple visiting contemporary America as tourists. They disagreed with the practices of their former home world, but eventually carve out a space for themselves in America.

The proposition isn’t a survey of America as a whole but a stylistic gesture about negotiating the artist’s space in a continually morphing conversation.

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

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.

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]

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.