David Castillo Gallery is proud to present  Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply with works by Samantha Bittman, Daniel Gordon, Adler Guerrier, Quisqueya Henriquez, Elana Herzog, Susan Lee-Chun, Robert Melee, Wardell Milan, Vik Muniz, Jayson Musson, Pascual Sisto, and Shinique Smith.

Like Adler Guerrier’s sculpture sourced from found materials building upon themselves with the premonish enchantment of an unbroken chain letter, the artists in Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply push daisies through substance and porosity, content and permeability. Contrary to the connivance of its title, Elana Herzog’s Monolith emits textiles like lichen, emblematic of a Web 2.0 fiberculture, a crafted groundcover whose over-indulgence spans material and concept.

Jayson Musson evokes fiberculture by deconstructing Coogi sweaters into paintings and granting them lives in the legacy of Brice Marden’s occupation with panel and line, the invention of a John McCracken “gangsta lean,” and the expression of Hennessy Youngman, Musson’s own art avatar. Like Quisqueya Henriquez’s progressive divergence from an Internet source image of a Blinky Palermo corner piece, Musson’s sweater frees the art object from Abstract Expressionism and the consumer object from hip-hop culture by indulging symbiosis worthy of Deleuze and Guattari’sCapitalism and Schizophrenia.

Samantha Bittman’s textile paintings similarly bling out topical illusion. Happiness by the Poolradicalizes luxury by locating it within domestic fiberculture. Susan Lee-Chun also works from the notion of home: Head in the Clouds obscures the cultural charge of porcelain kitsch with dreamy excess. Pascual Sisto’s diptych adds Blakean obfuscation to found photographs of Guy Debord using confetti or a tinted “day-for-night” filter. The latter reveals the work to be about the making of the work, a Deleuze and Guattarian desiring machine making no distinction between production and acquisition. A passionate Situationalist Internationalist, Debord therefore proves a fitting subject for Sisto’s indulgence of fiberculture.

Vik Muniz, Wardell Milan, and Daniel Gordon also condense elaborate productions into photographic end-results. Muniz’s materials whether banal chocolate or faces in sexual ecstasy after Dali, make for rich digestion. The world that Milan’s Christopher Columbus discovers includes the decay of graffiti and Greek columns, the potentiality of an airborne blimp and a closed bottle, the vibrations of a boombox and sneakers. This ecology supports Gordon’s smooth world where images slip from tableaus to photographs as if giving into the virtual potentials of Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs.

Shinique Smith and Robert Melee explore the vast nature of thingness, demonstrating the ironic procreativity of reduce-reuse-recycle in the environment of art. Smith weaves Modernist notions of beauty through postmodern, contextual labyrinths in a way that only lavish humanistic references touched by fiberculture, such as calligraphy and graffiti, could move. Don’t Get High On Your Own Supply celebrates and critiques the social history of technologies and artistic processes flashing like mirrors into the sun, unpredictable patinas of man and machine. In these working conditions of evolution, don’t get high on your own supply. Don’t mind your own business. Don’t stand on your own two feet, remembering the jester’s power to address King Henry VIII unmatched by any in his court.

Samantha Bittman
Daniel Gordon
Elana Herzog
Susan Lee-Chun
Robert Melee
Wardell Milan
Vik Muniz
Jayson Musson
Pascual Sisto