This past weekend, Echo Park saw the opening of WK Interact’s new show “How To Blow Yourself Up” at Subliminal Projects gallery. The Brooklyn-based artist mostly works within the grounds of the street and relies on black and white wheat pasting and spray-painting as his main media. The theme of most of his past works is the energy, rhythm, and impulse that navigate urban activities. For his show in Los Angeles, however, WK turned to vibrant multimedia and the buzzing subject matter of the apocalypse. By playing with everyday objects such as skateboards and bicycles, WK is successful at incorporating the mobility of street life into his take on the paranoia of the modern city atmosphere, especially that of Los Angeles and New York.
When walking into the gallery, one is first confronted with a replication of a police booking station. The installation functions as a way to book, tag, and catalogue the visitors (or rather “common criminals”) and introduce the air of pressing but also surprisingly playful anxiety. Following the station are several headshots in the style of mug shots (with fingerprints below each image) hung on the wall indicating that everyone is responsible for something, despite anonymity. Although universal criminality may seem shocking and disturbing at first, by the end of the show the viewer realizes it is simply a norm in terms of WK’s perspective on modern urban world. Deviance is the only way to properly function in the destructive environment that bombards modern society with notions of nihilistic doom, be it through post-September 11 institutional watch or cultural downfall that is reflected through explosion of advertisements and sensationalism of apocalyptic theories.
After the wall of shame (or perhaps pride), a number of multimedia sculptures are displayed in the gallery. Most of the sculptures are compact and seek intimacy from the viewer. It is almost as if this collection of works ask the viewer to touch and play with them. The only downside is their destructive nature. These are the works that provide the audience with the instruments for the activity that the title of the show, “How to Blow Yourself Up,” suggests.
One dominant installation that could define the whole show is Can I Help You With Something?, (2009) which entails a skateboard flipped backwards with inactive explosives attached to it. Surrounding the skateboard is a number of objects affiliated with destruction. The prop that brings credence to the title however, is the hand in a patent leather glove, which is gesturing towards the explosive. In comparison to the multiple other installations in the show, the presence of the human hand makes the destruction all the more imminent. In addition, by incorporating a human hand and not a machine, WK is suggesting that humans are in control of our own destruction and also perhaps we are the ones who are to blame for our decline into such a horrid situation. The reaching of the hand is also indicative of our desire to control our own destiny rather than have the system be its determinant.
WK also incorporates spray-painted portraits in the show that consists of distorted faces of angry males. The paintings give the appearance of the men struggling to leave another realm that is ominous in order break free into the world of the viewer. The work Sebastien (2008) is reflective of this whole group of paintings. It is of a man in total anguish. His mouth is agape reflecting his silent scream and his eyes are that of a possessed monster. Perhaps this is the apocalypse that WK is referring to throughout the course of the show? Perhaps these are the faces of infamy by means of self-destruction that are alluded in the title? The artist refuses to answer these questions but rather makes the viewer develop an answer, for it is the situation that we as human beings created which he I throws back at us by means of this show.
Although WK is an East Coast artist, the concepts behind this show may have easily been appropriate in the setting of the 1990’s Los Angeles. The chaos and the disappointment with humanity was felt in the works a little less than two decades ago especially in the case of the “Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990’s.” However, it was “the darker side of contemporary life” that was explored in the previous show, whereas now, WK not simply portrays some of the terrors of the urban environment but rather contend with the grim reality that WK believes humans imposed onto themselves.
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