And the clouds are the mud of His toes

Face pareidolia: seeing Jesus in toast, the Virgin Mary on a tortilla, God within the sky. In Erin Calla Watson’s “(Untitled) n.d.,” pareidolia is shirtless, smoking a cigarette, and looking out proper by you. It’s that one male mannequin, you already know the one, in a “man-altered panorama.” Calla Watson captures the primal human impulse to see an object, sample, or which means the place there isn’t one—imaging an area exterior of Chronos, or measurable time, the place sensory notion all the time beats logic. On this case, the artist undresses the historic “New Topographics: Images of a Man-altered Panorama” exhibition by grafting supermodel Jordan Barrett into these beforehand unoccupied landscapes, creating an instantaneous punctum.

Jordan’s face seems in probably locations—echoing an insatiable, ever-present violent pareidolia because the unconscious aspirations of a sect of middle-class, white American males. Right here lies the shirtless mall phantom in Calla Watson’s suburban gothic—circling endlessly across the post-2008 monetary disaster, recycling jocks and cheerleaders, post-truth, and supermodels. Calla Watson forges an applicable determine for this premature haunting of the present age: an anachronistic masculine superb of this current previous.

As a result of on-line photographs of Jordan are ubiquitous and encyclopedic, Calla Watson is ready to neatly place him in nearly any scenario (smoking, mouth agape, and many others), like a pliable proto-3d mannequin. Jordan seems in these works as a component for the entire—a synecdoche for an elusive masculine superb, a garish, clunky, at instances aptly disembodied determine. His poses take turns personifying variations of the deadpan, stylized, nameless, hypersexual—the sort of masculine that solely feeds again into the male gaze. This physique is its personal structure; a well-recognized panorama surrounded by lack.

Who precisely appears to be like into the sky and sees God? Who appears to be like into the sky and sees himself? Clouds are sometimes related to God. In sure corners of the web, a face like Jordan’s might as effectively be the identical. Jordan’s picture collapses in Calla Watson’s pictures. Nature is female, however the Nice Open air is completely different. Time spent “away from all of it” turns into the area of man.

—Makayla Bailey

at Cunning Manufacturing, New York
till October 8, 2023