Ecstatic Nature: Shiri Mordechay and Matt Rota

All art is seeded in some measure with dissatisfaction or anxiety with the world.  Hence the need to re-order an alternate or opposing view.  In some instances, particularly in times of cultural or economic stress, art acts to fracture reality to the very extent said realty is untenable or incomprehensible.  Novel forms, relationships and mythologies rear up in the pictorial space and augur a unique perspective that alters both inner being and world view.  This deconstruction and reordering is not without violence, a power struggle first witnessed by those unable to shield themselves from the marauding influxes unleased when cultural containers are compromised.  The rest of us, unseeing and insensitive, experience that battle as art.

In his newest series of drawings for Equity Gallery, Matt Rota dismisses his signature saturated dyes for the stark graphic of black and white, the latter an argot punctuated by an infinitesimal array of implying gestures and coded symbols.   A cue that he is threatening to abandon reality all together, and who can blame him, Rota retreats to the dream of history and casts its marauding gods, freaks, and half-crazed heretics in narrative intrigues lasting well past the sleeping hours.  The series, a frenzied scavenger hunt unearthing blasphemies, taboos and every god-forsaken mishap known to modern man, can only lead to the jumping off point---the cliff’s edge that separates the agnostics from the true believers.  The former, high-minded and vainglorious, are ever ready to fall on their swords in a last-ditch effort at redemption whilst the latter blunders on, occasionally committing random acts of revenge when reality threatens to close in. 

Double billed with Rota, Shiri Mordechay is similarly showing a new series of works on paper at Equity.   Like Rota, Mordechay’s new work evinces a masterful exploitation of the immediacy and spontaneity of drawing⎯in particular a compelling balance between narrative potential and the veiled coding proffered by water media.  And while Rota reaches for a dissonant ensemble of line expressions, from skittish jumps to adrenaline-pumped swipes, to alchemize his compositions, Modechay floods the picture plane leaving Rorschach bleeds, tide marks, and a  layered sediment of forms, simultaneously ethereal, dense, and teeming with the alien life. 

Strange birds both, save Mordechay, has largely dispelled with any seeming effort to temper her wild imaginings with the slightest reference to the outside world.   Her expedition is a DUI joyride to the phantasmagoric underbelly of the unconscious.  Technicolor lizards, ruffed changelings, assorted livestock, and poison fruit collide in a giddy idyll—a pagan forerunner to a Thanksgiving feast. 

The haunting question however is whether Mordechay is pulling our leg; are these works simply (as she states) traces of the wonderous wanderings of an unquestionably inventive mind or are we glimpsing the preternatural sentience of a world to come?