Nancy Shaver

"Eric's Trip," Lisa Cooley -June 24, 2014

 

 

Lisa Cooley is thrilled to announce Eric’s Trip, curated by Cynthia Daignault and Mark Loiacono. Featuring new works by Victoria Fu, Sheila Hicks, David Kennedy-Cutler, José Lerma, Margaret Lee, Judith Linhares, Rory Mulligan, Kamau Amu Patton, Nancy Shaver, and Mathew Zefeldt, Eric's Trip presents a sequence of hallucinatory musings on color and consciousness in painting, photography, sculpture and video.

Eric’s Trip takes its impetus from Reel 9 (“Eric Tells All”) of Andy Warhol’s 1966 film Chelsea Girls. In it, actor, musician and dancer Eric Emerson delivers a stream-of-conscious monologue while under the influence of LSD. During the course of a single unedited reel, Eric strips off his clothes, devolving into a primal, narcissistic state. Naked and tripping, he delivers a solipsistic soliloquy on subjects ranging from the nature of sexuality and selfhood, to the imprecision of language and the senses. One of the few color reels in Chelsea Girls, Eric’s performance takes place under a bank of colored floodlights that Warhol manipulates at will, building to a startling crescendo of Technicolor psychedelia. Through the use of mirrors, unmotivated zooms, and unorthodox framing, Warhol obscures and distorts Eric’s body, just as the lysergic acid alters his consciousness.

Centering on notions of performance, projection and aura, this exhibition examines the process of narrating consciousness, experience, trip and vision. Like “Eric Tells All," the works included in Eric’s Trip explore our intrinsically fallacious understanding of reality and the imprecision that colors our attempts to describe it. These are objects that challenge their own boundaries, that negotiate the discrepancy between hallucinatory fantasy and fixed reality, and that offer material traces of a world that has been fragmented and reorganized in pieces.

Eric’s Trip will be on view from June 28th through August 1st. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 28th, from 6 until 8pm. Over the course of the exhibition there will be a number of coordinated events at the gallery, including an evening of durational sounds with Kamau Amu Patton; the anticipated release of the second volume of A-Z; and a seminal film and video program of new and historic films selected by Warren Ng and the curators.  (excerpt)

 

Lisa Cooley gallery is located at 107 Norfolk Street, just one block east of Essex Street between Rivington and Delancey. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, from 10am to 6 pm, and always by appointment. June 28 - august 1, 2014.