BE THERE
Sub-RoyalPresented by Sara Meltzer Gallery May 6, 2008- June 14, 2008Reception: May 16, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pmJude TallichetJudeTallichet's work plays on tropes from popular culture and modernism. While the images in Sub-Royal are wilder and more humorous than before, the physical and psychic violence is more explicit. Sigmund Freud famously described dreams as the "royal road to the unconscious," as highly symbolic mental products that were the result of unconscious wishes, censoring mechanisms of the ego and events in waking life. Colloquially the "Royal Road" refers to the fastest and most efficient way from point A to point B. Cultural references to the Royal Road stem from the ancient highway built in the 5th Century B.C. to facilitate rapid communication - the Royal Road began in present-day Southern Turkey and ended, coincidentally, in present-day Baghdad, Iraq. At the center of the exhibition is a 50s-era psychiatrist couch cast in bronze and polished to a high sheen. A surgical lamp re-fabricated in rusty steel stands nearby. A stainless steel sign with the word "GO" cut out leans against the wall, emitting a simple yet completely confusing command or permission. Competition, American art history, team identity and violence are represented by a steal target whose design is inspired by the movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, and black steel gun-metal arrows pierced in the wall. Heads of ubiquitous characters from American political history, horror films and Roswell aliens cast in white hydrocal lie decapitated in casual proximity to each other, all victims of the same unidentified atrocity. Two small silver monuments – a geodesic dome with four hooves and an obelisk on ice skates stand as absurd trophies. The room installation alludes to an epic saga which, drawn from the "real" world may only exist in the free-associating mind of the mythic analysand. Sub-Royal calls attention to our own solipsistic history. If dreams can be subtle and profound reflections on the path to self-analysis, then the Sub-Royal is the madhouse that is reality, which comes to simply pass through our minds.
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