Allison Rentz in "Truebador" (installation view)

Last Friday's Castleberry Hill Art Stroll was an improvement over last month's stroll by about a factor of ten. If March's shows appeared to be organized by safety-minded accountants at CNN, April's shows are by in large gutsier and riskier with bigger payoffs and grander, more exhilarating flops.

Which side of the fence Allison Rentz's "Truebador" at Garage Projects fell on is a matter of debate, but I for one won't quibble with her willingness to take a broadminded risky leap.

The installation consisted of her usual materials--plastic sheeting, recycled plastic waste products, rope, tape, sharpie marker, and chains--in a minimal palette of black, grays, white, and red. This is the palette of death metal album covers and Tim Burton flicks. Rentz also seems to allude to heavy metal tropes in the spiky gothic imagery of her ink drawings and in her personal calligraphy, which I always imagine has an Iron Maiden soundtrack playing behind it.

Throughout the performance Rentz engaged in a self-absorbed monologue of gestures, including wrapping, tying, excavating, and rearranging of pieces that recalled imagery of birth, loss (breakdown), and recovery. Periodically, the artist would stop all other activities and intone some speech into a resonating container of some kind (a water bottle?) using long, distended syllables. I wish I could have made out more of the speech, but the noise from the street and the jazz band at Noir competed sonically for attention. Nor did the speech seem particularly intended for me, or for anyone other than Rentz herself and that water bottle or whatever it was.


Drawing from "Truebador," ink on paper in plastic sheet

Rentz's performance was an exercise in public vulnerability. The artist seemed to be trying to figure things out as she went along in an intuitive and naive sort of way. This stands to reason since Allison Rentz has been living more or less in public for the last several years. She begs on the internet for money to help pay her credit card bills. She appears at public lectures and forums and makes loopy announcements about her art empire. For Rentz, there appears to be no distinction between the public and the private. Her performance then took on the feeling of watching a teenager playing with things in her room, refusing to clean it up, while the volume in her earbuds is pumped up to 10.

The whole death metal thing enjoyed a brief, black explosion in the art world a few years ago. Banks Violette and Sue de Beer were displaying their adolescent melancholy to an art world that seemed happy to revel in public teen angst. Is Rentz's work an extension of that aesthetic? Maybe. It certainly shares the same sense of a teenager's personal world of dark forces that require signing a pact of irreversible damnation before being admitted. Her work, too, is adolescent in that way; that is, awkward and looking at itself as a dark imponderable. It is always occupying a space where the world is a terrifying carnival ride of disequilibrium.



But if it is gothic, it's gothic as filtered through a southern sensibility of layered age, rot, history, and decay. Where Violette is shiny and slick, Rentz is worn and broken. She is Southern Gothic. This brokenness in the face of great dark forces brings to mind the southern gothic of Michi Meko's latest gambit at Eyedrum or Brian Parks's lonely music in lost spaces.

These artists are all cringe-inducingly vulnerable. They let their flaws direct their work toward what always feels like a demise or endless struggling of some sort. They are all William Faulkner characters, producing "horror as well as amazement." Succeed or fail, I'm enjoying the experience as they take us down this long, dark slide to oblivion.

Awesome review.

I hadn't thought of Rentz' performance as influenced by Southern Gothic - that makes it even more interesting, to hear you mention jazz overpowering the spoken portion of her performance.

Now I'm trying to remember whether Rentz hand sewed her dress.

Yeah, then that becomes interesting on a number of levels--the jazz aesthetic v. the metal aesthetic, the contesting of space as a high-art destination district (Castleberry Hill) essentially plops down in the middle of the 'hood. Also, the jazz band at Noir overpowered not only Rentz, but infected the Victor Ekpuk show next door at Wertz to the extent that a certain magenta haired socialite was heard wondering aloud if the gallery had become a foyer for the club. I hear many are lamenting the clubification of Castleberry.

The focus of castleberry does seem to have shifted away from the art that made the area so popular - but that sad song has been sung many times before...

excellent excellent review - this really puts Rentz's work in perspective for me, it is very much about an airing out of the private mind for public consumption (or confusion?)