NYAB Event - Christopher Chiappa "High Fructose Corn Syrup"

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At Kate Werble Gallery
Media: Photography, Sculpture, Film

Kate Werble Gallery presents Christopher Chiappa's first solo show in eight years, High Fructose Corn Syrup. In this exhibition, Chiappa employs self-portraiture as a technique to heighten psychological and cultural decay. The title, High Fructose Corn Syrup, is a reference to the artist’s transition from adolescence into adulthood, and his realization of the disappointment of human experience. A daily Coke drinker, he hit puberty just as Coca Cola’s formula switched from using sugar to high fructose corn syrup.

Chiappa uses a simple switch of the ordinary to emphasize an omnipresent disequilibrium in the photographic portrait of the artist in his studio, I Always Knew It Would Come To This. Wearing his usual self-dictated uniform of a white shirt, black pants and Nike Prefontaines, the picture represents the madness of the everyday – his shirt is on his legs and his pants and shoes on his arms and torso with his head popping out of a hole cut in the crotch.

Cloaking the gallery in black plastic, Chiappa aims to push the viewer to re-evaluate the physical gallery: anything can happen within the space. His uniquely American sculpture, Cornball, becomes a handmade icon; a basketball covered in kernels of corn. Cornball layers one recognizable American thing onto another, referencing pop culture as well as Koons’ suspended basketballs.

Unordinary tension builds within Hermit Crab, a video manipulating common childhood pet Hermit Crabs in a way that depicts power and abuse. The artist’s head is cropped out of each frame as he methodically glues each of the twenty-five hermit crab shells together to form a circle. The crabs’ behavior during the gluing evokes human struggle and strategies for coping as a group. Although the crabs were not hurt in any way, an unsettling, uncomfortable feeling prevails.

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