Review

A review of Christopher John Bostwick's Do You Need a Friend to Go With?

Christopher John Bostwick, "A Bucket of Tears For You To Soak Your Aching Heart," colored pencil on paper, 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

Wonder Fair Gallery / Shoppe / Studio
Lawrence, Kansas
July 30 — August 22, 2010

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?

Questions of Travel is poet Elizabeth Bishop’s ode to the Brazilian highway. It is a journey in which imagination, language and politics come to an intersection where surprising discoveries are made, based on both immediate findings and memory. Bishop was an outside explorer looking into and portraying the culture and scenes of Brazil. In Christopher John Bostwick’s exhibition, Do You Need a Friend to Go With? at Wonder Fair Gallery, the recent KCAI graduate forms his own visual questions of virtual travel by challenging our perception of ordinary imagery and media consumption. Bostwick’s work is informed by both personal experience and endless Internet searches, resulting in lonesome, hand-drawn stages, filled with both generic, glazed-over Google images and vivid snippets of remembrance.

Bostwick is a 21st-century Gulliver, an explorer-cum-troller who not only sorts through the endless wondercrap of the Internet but also understands the value of making more opportunities for discovery in his art. A hybrid of backyard hedges and rainforest fauna open up in Bostwick’s fictitious landscapes, giving his works an inexplicable, two-dimensional depth. He seeks to un-normalize ordinary objects by making curious scenes that immediately conjure a vague nostalgia and moments remembered only when you see the surprising groupings.

“This sort of voyeur feeling comes from some of my social anxieties where I would sometimes rather just sit back and watch people interact with one another rather than interact directly,” Bostwick writes. “Sort of like watching a movie.”

Christopher John Bostwick, "And It Was A Grey Day When She Hated The Gift I Built For Her," colored pencil and pencil on paper, 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

In the work, And it was a grey day when she hated the gift I built for her, Bostwick revisits his past as a youngster whose mind was always in “skate mode.” A Technicolor skate-ramp — much like one of the dream skate parks he might have drawn as a kid — sits in the middle of a heart-stained, grass island. He is tireless with his drawings. Lines and lines of grass form in deliberate sheets that look as if they were made by the world's tiniest lawnmower. Flowers and weeds grow through a broken board of the derelict ramp. Enveloped by frighteningly steep sides, the sad, fallen remnants of a barbecue intersperse with one of Bostwick’s common icons — traffic cones. Attached to the corners of the ramp are sherbet-colored balloons that fail to lift away the structure from the lonely stage of the artist’s creation.

All of his works, including And it was a grey day, are infused with part personal experience, part randomness and part deliberate planning. Extremely technical drawings of mundane shopping carts and hospital beds are the centerpieces of settings that, like memory or imagination, fray at the edges.

Although certain works are highly staged, in The Undertaker’s Revenge, Bostwick lets the audience into his seemingly scattered, stream-of-conscious process. Originally, a wrestling video on YouTube titled “The Undertaker vs. Randy Orton” led Bostwick through an odd chain of Google image searches for “coffins, wrestling ring, funerary flower arrangements, and related backdrops,” which are the focus of the work. Bad News lights up in neon pinks and greens. Intricate wood-grain detailing is present in only certain areas of a floor that surrounds a fighting ring. Despite the amount of color in the work, scattered beer bottles are left only penciled in. Bostwick’s poetic notes — left either for himself or the viewer — hang in the surrounding white space.

Christopher John Bostwick, "The Undertaker's Revenge (Bad News)," faux wood, color pencil, and gouache on paper, 2010. Image: courtesy of the artist

“There definitely is a sort of randomness to my searches at first, then images begin to connect in my mind,” he writes. “However, there are times when I know exactly what I want. Sometimes the searches form the drawings and sometimes the drawings form the searches."

Bostwick’s repetition of the ideas and phrases of “Good News” and “Bad News” intensifies his questions and responses to media consumption. “When it comes to my imagery, I like to pair the phrase “Good News” with imagery that is usually associated with “Bad News”… like skulls,” Bostwick writes. “It’s all about pairing the good with the bad on account of those two things are often times in bed with one another.”

The iconography Bostwick portrays — rainbows, skulls, helmets, and traffic cones— is relentlessly pervasive in everyday life. Yet even in a gallery setting, his vignettes are universally personal. There is a preciousness about his work — as if these places, made up of the very generic — are also the most dear. They are the secret images inside a locket, or in Bostwick's case, a part of his search engine history.

-re-

Popularity: 3% [?]

Updating...