A Show of Their Own

LA’s fem-centric gallery, compactspace, explores the nostalgic side of men with and the world is ours

By Jennifer S. Li
Published: February 17th, 2010 | 11:25pm

Glenna Jennings directs and curates downtown LA's compactspace, known for its emphasis, though by no means exclusive, on female artists and feminist groups. The current show, and the world is ours, features the work of new media artists Tim Schwartz and Robert Twomey, two guys whom Jennings describes as "manly men."

For the show, Jennings literally and metaphorically invited the male presence into this formerly feminine space. Schwartz's giant ten foot stalactite with unwitting yet obvious allusions to the phallus protrudes its large mass into the center of the small, one-room gallery. "He's an American male from the Midwest—of course he has to do a penis project," jokes Jennings. Hung on the walls are Twomey's Xerox transfer drawings depicting the male-dominated computer industry.

Typically known for their work in new media, the show represents a departure from digitized ephemera and a return to the manmade art-object. At the heart of both bodies of work is nostalgia for events and occurrences that the young men, in their late twenties to early thirties, never experienced first-hand, but could easily research and summon with the aid of Google.

Schwartz's fascination with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, rendering that part of the world the most toxic site on earth, inspired his stalactite sculpture Ruin. Fabricated from fiberglass and painted with iron, the piece descends from the ceiling, its sharp tip hovering just above the floor. Automated, timed machines emit mists of saltwater every few minutes. The water drips slowly down the spiky mass, corroding the surface and pooling into a puddle at the center of the gallery. With organic forms and encrustations and naturally deleterious process, the work nods to '60s and '70s "earthworks" like those of Robert Smithson and James Turrell.

Scouring the internet for his source material, Twomey pictures the dawn of the information age in the early '70s and the era of the supercomputer in Human Factors in Computing Systems: Studies. Using Google Images and other search engines, Twomey found old photographs of people working in the interiors of corporate computer offices like IBM. He then reinterpreted these images using the painstaking Xerox transfer process to create images akin to a charcoal drawing on watercolor paper. The renderings are hung up on the walls with binder clips, a subtle glorification of utilitarian office supplies (as well as a reference to the makeshift hanging device common in artist studios). With a sketch-like aesthetic, Twomey obscures the images and information on them, turning what were once records of a historical epoch into fuzzy memories of a bygone era.

The title of the male-centered show is an apt citation from a poem by Philip Levine, who, growing up in Detroit in the '20s and '30s, often wrote of industry and a melancholy masculinity. The show is a reminder that certain feelings and phenomena typically considered feminine—nostalgia, sentimentality, and the like—afflict both sexes, even "manly men."

See the show at compactspace through March 30.