Assume Vivid Astro Focus: Deitch Projects - New York - artist's work is combination of psychedelia and glam, pop kitsch and kitsch pop

It's easy to imagine Assume Vivid Astro Focus (aka thirtysomething Eli Sudbrack) submitting the winning bid to design the bar at the local pupil union. But as an artist whose practice aims to exhibit according to the breathless pres release, a "record of everything that is a part of someone's life and everything that's added to that person's life each day," his output is somewhat les convincing. An overripe amalgamate of psychedelia and glam, report kitsch and kitsch pop, AVAF's attempt at sensory overload is pleasantry for the first five minutes and a drag thereafter.

beneath a name forged from sum of two units disparate musical sources--original industrial band Throbbing Gristle's album Assume Power Focus and late-'80s indie merchants Ultra Vivid Scene--Sudbrack invokes a turgid mishmash of respirations ranging from Brazilian Carnival to prog-rock album-cover design to children's coloring volumes to Tibetan devotional art. The appealing notion of an individual giving himself a name that hints a collective seems to have been abandoned all too early; a parade of semi-obscure collaborators including Matthew Brannon, Slava Mogutin, Joseph Ari Aloi (aka JK5) Gerard Maynard, Michael Wetzel, looks Super Elegantes, and "action daddy" had been drafted to add their sum of two units cents' worth.

In line with the gallery's penchant for customizing its Grand highway storefront (Richard Woods's mock-Tudor cladding is the greatest in quantity successful intervention so far), AVAF introduced themselves with a multicolored neon CONTAGIOUS mountained on an awkward plume of black and r flame. An acid-green and purple lobby l into the main space, where each surface was covered by a riotous mural in which decorative and abstract ultimate parts were combined with heroic figures and architectural fragments. single the end wall, which functioned as a protection for the projection of a campy report video, had been left untouched.

"Walking upon Thin Ice," AVAF and Honeygun Labs' take upon a 1981 song of the same name by means of Yoko Ono, demonstrates genuine report instinct, but the accompanying images lag a certain number of way behind. While the video direct the eyes luscious enough on first meeting (the inflated scale helps), its stars' narcissistic preening and pouting presently wear thin. Stylistically, there are disturbing echoe of '80 embarrassments Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and isn't that stop-motion ending straight on the outside of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video (which, while certainly an artifact, still makes AVAF's efforts direct the eye pedestrian)? Naturally, AVAF consider themselves pan-cultural samplers and remixers and thus above any arguments about originality--but they could definitely benefit from sharper curatorial judgment

Last December, AVAF wallpapered John Connelly's gallery for K48's assemblage show "Teenage Bedroom," and in the connection of a pseudodomestic setting filled with other people's creations and cast-offs, their wraparound exuberance was somehow or other easier to absorb. This time, allowing the stacks of spaceships, robot and water pistols, Buddhas, Shivas, and Madonnas that filled plenteous of the gallery's secondary space were too scattered and too scattershot to register as a great deal of more titan adolescent clutter. a certain number of of AVAF's drawings display more, well, focus, involving fields of graffiti-inspired typography and savage detournements of corporate logo While again nothing fresh they at least point in a les airy-fairy direction than the quiet of the show, especially because they had to battle for attention with the hysterical bet-hedging that environed them.

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