THE PLEASURE GROUND
Matt Savitsky
@
Cloaca Projects
1460 Davidson Avenue
San Francisco, California
Review by Mattson Fields
Cloaca Projects is where one goes for a respite from clean, well-behaved art1. For this reason, the warm fuzzies upon entering Matt Savitsky’s THE PLEASURE GROUND are completely disarming—I don’t expect to find sleepy pastorals at the same gallery that Savitsky himself jig-sawed a dollhouse to pieces in during a live, synth-laden drag rampage last year2. Eventually though, the idyllic green pastures of PLEASURE GROUND give way to a sense of unease in this hypnotic, slow burn of a show.
Savitsky has doubled the length of the usually garage-sized gallery, adding a gable-roofed build out. Entering the addition through a plywood side door, you’re thrust into the middle of the two-channel video installation Crop Circles. In it, a projection of Savisty’s sister framed by a rotating blue sky in the reflection of a mirror plays across from…a projection of Savisty’s sister against a rotating blue sky in the reflection of a mirror. Both subjects are singing the hymn Simple Gifts in different keys:
'Tis a gift to be simple
'Tis a gift to be free
'Tis a gift to come down where we ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
It will be in the valley of love and delight
When true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend, we will not be ashamed
To turn, turn, will be our delight
'Til by turning, turning, we come round right
The melody sedates and is simultaneously unsettling due to an askew canon occurring between the dueling audio feeds. It’s easy to lose your balance staring into the swirling verdant backdrop.
In the back of the gallery is Turn Bridge, a single channel projection of fences, trees, and silos from Lancaster, Pennsylvania (the artist’s hometown and location of the self-created residency where PLEASURE GROUND was conceived). Objects float across the picture plane as though being filmed from the smoothest, most serene car ride. Light is leaking from a large fissure along the edge of the waist high pedestal beneath the projector. Peering into the leak reveals a small paper version of Lancaster, set around a miniature covered wooden truss bridge rotating on a carousel. A camcorder is filming the scene through the bridge and sending a live feed to the projector above. The silhouette of the bridge walls frames the video and forms the shape of the mirror in Circles.
Connections like these set the work in precarious relation to itself and create a fractal-like structure to the show that tinges the breezy lullaby in Circles with a new, foreboding undertone. Not only has Savitsky extended the gallery with his renovation, he’s made it into the barn-like shape of the truss bridge and brought you inside. You are trapped between scales of pastoral utopia, a matryoshka doll of the ever-looming American bargain: give up city living for a quiet, rural existence with your friends and family, be outside, grow vegetables.
The initial feeling of being swaddled in a bucolic daydream gives way to something more Midsommar3. His songstresses become sirens calling you home, away from the rat race, out to pasture. However, just as Savistky sets his works adrift in constant motion, security and even-footing are never assured, even in small town obscurity. Backwards politics, job prospects, FOMO—ex-urban life has challenges too, and starting over frequently ends in its own, new failure4. PLEASURE GROUND reminds us not to worry: you can always start over, again.
THE PLEASURE GROUND runs through October 26th at CLOACA PROJECTS.
see Kevin Killian, “Atlas San Francisco: Withdrawal Symptoms,” Art in America, February 2019, https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/atlas-san-francisco-withdrawal-symptoms/
performance with bran(…)pos, January 13, 2018
Ari Aster’s 2019 film about a swedish vacation that goes awry
see Jenny Odell, “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Chapter 2 - The Impossibility of Retreat, Melville House, 2019
