shift, return

Geoffrey Chadsey’s solo show at Electric Works proves that the artist, who trained in drawing and photography at California College of the Arts, is increasingly “thinking like a painter.” Chadsey excels as both a colorist and portraitist; his art unites multiple visual languages together with notions of desire, homosexuality, gender, and technology in this new suite of watercolor-pencil-on-Mylar drawings. 

Take Portrait (Pink Beak) (2010), where drawing and painting strategies nicely overlap. A moist sheen of azure blue coats the figure’s forehead and collects into a single, slender watery drip that drains down his chest. A fantastical mutation of the subject’s profile, stretched, plastic-like, is rendered in slender ribbons of salmon.

Chadsey’s interrogation of gay social and visual culture recalls Hal Foster’s 1985 essay “Subversive Signs,” in which he considers art that uses the public sphere “as both a target and weapon.” Foster was writing about scene-stealers, like Barbara Kruger, and appropriation; one could wage that Chadsey’s art evinces and attacks the gay online—a dense, ever-evolving realm of posing and preening.

Chadsey “nabs” anonymous male self-portraits from chat rooms to spark his art. Then, using watercolor pencil, he “cross-breeds” a face or a pair of lips from a magazine or from a snapshot of a friend or family member. Extra pairs of limbs are sometimes added. His strategies situate his mash-ups in the territory, among others, that Matthew Higgs describes for painters in his 2002 “Reality Check: Painted in the Exploded Field” essay where “sampling, hacking, and [the] downloading” are integrated into contemporary practice.

Portrait (Pink Beak), 2010; Watercolor pencil on Mylar; 36" x 34". Courtesy of Electric Works, San Francisco.

Chadsey's Grinder (2010), for example, a reference to the gay mobile application that pinpoints user locations using Global Positioning System technology, remarks on the anonymous and amateur digital self-portrait. Here, a young man sucks in his stomach for the camera. Chadsey activates his gaunt face, as if it’s twitching or in cranked-up spasms; a third eye stares out.

A new hybrid race has been envisioned here—and one that looms large. Chadsey has an uncanny ability to pluck a lonely image out of the Darwinian online sea, invest it with chimerical qualities—multiple sets of arms, a ghastly beak—and redeploy it, terrifyingly and gorgeously re-worked. In Chadsey’s hands, these posers flourish and command. There should be a waiting list.

shift, return is on view at Electric Works, in San Francisco, through February 12, 2011.

Brent Foster Jones lives in New York and previously taught at California College of the Arts.