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]

April 2–30, 2016 / Terrault Contemporary / Baltimore, MD

10 things you didn’t know about the Wickerham & Lomax show:

1. Boosting ideas from tired artworks is an erotic gesture.
2. Pumping through life on someone else’s frequent flyer miles is supreme luxury.
3. Killing trends by being late to them, maximizing lateness to a point of infinity.
4. A fucked up kind of bricolage solidified into an elegant turd.
5. Being quiet, yet screaming telepathically.
6. Supplementals have a way of burrowing to the center.
7. I wanna steal your shit. I wanna take your vision.
8. Presenting glass in which you can’t be reflected, but still shattered.
9. Wardrobe stolen from geeks online.
10. Should we thank Joanne? Never give credit.

The ten statements above can be applied to any of the ten digital paintings in the show as functioning titles. The paintings are at once about the props which are stylistically culled from the look of W&L’s Boy’dega: EditedforSyndication and then the item chosen is presented in various types of display. In Boy’dega’s narrative, it’s suggested that one of the characters, Kimbra, works in an antique store owned by her parents. This works as a prompt not completely coinciding with the mandates of the world building’s continuity, but as an offshoot to extend further world building possibility. The manner to which the props are presented, becomes a way to further inform the fiction of these items, to provide them with a logic structure that could lead towards reality (believability). The process of generating these paintings works like a kind of assemblage, certain aspects during the CGI process are cut from other models and recombined to create a new set of conditions/context for the CGI model.

The core ideas of the exhibition are: provisionality, display, artifact, speculation, and style. In their practice Wickerham & Lomax have made the forms that are peripheral elements to a television show be the core of their works — elements that fortify the aspects of commitment to truth in a fiction. These often include: character profiles, wardrobe, set/location, trailers, and now props. This way of working acts as a metaphor of giving anything of marginality an added value not to be diminished by the thing of centrality. The works themselves have a symbiotic relationship feeding of the other’s waste and generating a kind of value for themselves.

Thrift, steal, destroy, ponder, messy… apologize.

Wickerham & Lomax invite you to perform yourself and karaoke if you please at the opening of their new video installation. The first in a three-part project entitled "The Baltimore Trilogy," the exhibition uses the materiality of bars, performance spaces, and nightlife venues to stage, engage, and rewire tropes of performance art. Organized around forms of social exchange in a Baltimore gay bar called The Drinkery, "Take Karaoke" is a voluptuous bionic striptease; a riot of frivolous adaptation; a performative jump-off; a platform (literally!) for activism, pick-up lines, and stand-up comedy.

SYNOPSIS
Various elements of nightlife take on a new utility in the feature-length work by allowing moments of excess to become performance gestures. Digital modification treats the body as a springboard for experimentation between chthonic elements and bionic appendages to layer visual glamour on performative spectacle. In capitalizing on troupes of performance, such as stand-up comedy, karaoke singing, striptease, pick up lines and drinking games, stylized violence and onstage presence become distorted. Codification occurs through a commitment to the form that is in tension with the artists’ interpretive relationship to what performance actually may be. The whole work functions as an experiment of compositing real life frivolity with imagined digital obstructions/adaptations.

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.

Wickerham & Lomax

Girth Proof is the first physical "spin off" from the BOY'Dega website—specifically from the section titled Keys to the Khroma Klub. Girth Proof considers the territory of the club, where gay Bears have been placed, as a liminoid for potential customization. The detritus of disaster is reclaimed to form an antidote to the mundane. Bad behavior remaps the social codes of nightlife. These vinyl flyers list demands and promises the way all flyers demand and promise access and privilege.

The vinyls push the typical layered visuals seen in actual club flyers over the edge of good taste. The images are variously pierced with digital grommets threaded with diamond necklaces, scaffolded with gold-studded planks scarred with text, split and then re-bound with trompe-l’œil laces. The gay hosts are under decorative assault and repair, and the viewer is invited to deal directly with the superficial—to “get into it” or get out.

We have previously looked at collaboration through the lens of best friends, fashion designers and show runners as surrogates for ourselves. Most recently, we have identified as gay dads who "gave birth" to the character named Boy'd, the primary figure of the sprawling online narrative franchise BOY'Dega. Girth Proof belts this endless self-expansion and looks at what and who—is being squeezed out. It began with a casting call for gay Bears. This subculture is at the center of the exhibition in so much that it is the material spread around four club flyers.

A visionless prototype (BOY’D) throws a desktop through a storefront window. The resulting storyboard vinyl suggests a merger/marriage/mirage. This is a previsualization for the collaborative's invented miniseries, BOYD'ega. [BOY’D?] is a protagonist developed in the early decades of the new millennium to star in a miniseries as a notion to challenge teenagers to push their bodies in regards to fitness, technology, lifespan, self-esteem, and multi-tasking. The miniseries premiered on June 2, 2018.

BOY'Dega Edited4Syndication is a project disseminated digitally through a website containing video and media rich content that looks at television as an expanding form.

If there is merit in the actor's ability to embody his character, there too could be value in the author's ability to embody their fans.

Television’s evolving penchant for storytelling has given way to its own peripheral distribution platforms such as: Hulu, Netflix, official show sites, and fan sites that inform a show’s episodic universe. These central narratives can also manage to be at odds with their syndicated selves leading towards: moralizing reedits, binge viewing, appropriation, shared commentary and further convolutedness. Through these a new story evolves that implicates the collective makers, participants, and addicts as formidable foes to the show’s creators.

“We are both the fans and the parents of our progeny (prodigy).”

Boy’dega: Edited 4 Syndication is a website that uses a model to extrapolate scenarios and visuals from systems that seek to either qualify or quantify the body in the urban sphere, and through levels of role confusion create a form of security through obscurity. The site is a supplemental to the show’s non-existence, a consciously chosen mirage based on aspects of HBO’s The Wire. The model posits the nature of interchangeability through a set of key roles in any show’s canon: the character, the author, the fan, and the actor working towards a dissolving of their stability. HBO’s The Wire presented a metropolis where bureaucratic institutions and the people they quantify are steeped in codes, hierarchies, and modes of conduct while simultaneously policing each other. The show’s creator David Simon uses the phase “juking the stats” referring to institutions that setup systems and test only to benefit from their results directly. This phrase/action implying moral ambiguity sets a working model for his series. The nature of this ambiguity lead us to our model and a set of 5 central terms as modes of operation.

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.

Curator Nathan Lee commissioned DUOX to respond to Derek Jarman's 'Blue' and reflect on the becoming-viral of the digital ?ueer.