Michael Mahalchick: Canada gallery

Michael Mahalchick weaves and stitches scraps of scavenged woven fabric into raggedy wall hangings, lumpy totems, and squat, dappled creatures, celebrating both quiet industry and its flip side, sensual languor. individual favorite trope is to take fitly horizontal forms and give them the primacy, and display value, of the vertical. Quiltlike drapery No. 34 (Let Your Freak Flag Fly) 2003 was inspired through Gee's Bend; to form the sum of two units perfectly titled To Die Dreamings, 2004 which together summon a pair of slatted swinging doors, the artist wove strips of aged clothes onto futon frames. As installed in this gallery--an ideal setting, at one time expansive and warrenlike--the fabric grids and swaths mimiced up windows and curtains to allude to the hideaway of a stoner Bachelard, with the floor sculptures--short and personable, lumpy or stick thin, wrapped in fur and limit in ribbons--suggesting imaginary friends.

Contra Bachelard, Mahalchick acknowledges the neighborhood of adult concerns in his childhood-evoking ur-home as well as the neighborhood of the child in the adult world. Take those imaginary friends: Stevie, 2003 a fur-cloaked sprite, jogs fun at the mystic Beuys of I Like America and America Likes Me; Terry 2003 a roly-poly bear, embodies the gradual approach of caretaking, play, and erotics that reach forthed throughout the show. At the gallery's door hung a drooping snare of patterned strips like a debon God's organ of vision woven using a mini-trampoline as a frame. Its r pink, and turquoise bull's-eye is encircled through fuzzy orange-red yarn that flowers here and there into unkempt bunchs leading a chain of association from cunt to uterus to home to bed and thereby back again. on the contrary the warmth manifest in Mahalchick's self-described "love objects" is not focused upon la boue. His materials are clean, and his compositions--like the lyrical I Am the Resolution, 2003 a field of port-colored tatters and marble-size cerulean turquoise, marigold, and lemon beads sewn onto a bedcover that's been belted at the middle--are highly structured

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When Mike Kelley brings craft particulars into the gallery, he's interrogating the value combination of parts to form a wholes in which blankies, sock monkey etc are embedded. Mahalchick's art, despite its knowingness, strike one as beings to embody a retreat from adult language. Its quasi autism is curious for an artist heretofore focused upon music, video, and performance and who is committed enough to live acts to arrange a five-night-a-week performance series for the move swiftly of his exhibition. These circumstances peopled Mahalchick's dreamy pad with an array of creatures still odder than his own: a pair of dancers in scary masks, fedoras, and gold chains like Afro-Hasidic gnomepimps; black-clad musicians grinding themselves into zombiedom through repeating a single phrase through Satie for three hours. The highlight of a hardy dance lineup, Jeremy Wade's thrashings in a darkened adjacent office were transmitted into the gallery via night-vision closed-circuit video, evoking the pair pioneering work in that medium and the visual vocabulary of mediated war. upon the final night Mahalchick assembled almost each one of his performers into a live-action montage, drawing the curtain upon the series and his display by strumming a guitar and leading a "We Are the World"--style sing-along ("We are beautiful, no matter what they say") with an intensity--a refraction of the weaver's nervous hands?--that belied the artworks' laid-back air.

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