Sayre Gomez and J. Patrick Walsh III
by Travis Diehl, ARTFORUM, June 2011
Like the bare frame of a building, the angular name of Zzyzx, California, serves as a kind of linguistic scaffold for this exhibition. A mixture of sculpture, painting, collage, and video articulates a loose imaginary corollary to the town at the end of the alphabet through a series of correspondences that are formally clear yet logically tenuous and, ultimately, charged with unnamed fears. Sayre Gomezʼs use of bold primary colors and J. Patrick Walsh IIIʼs muddled yet ecstatic palette provide easy links between the individual pieces. For example, a chunk of sunny yellow foam beneath the flat-screen television in Walshʼs Knifeʼs Sun (all works 2011) seems to exist only to match the hue of Gomezʼs The Charismatic Object. Similarly, nonsensical text in a serif font featured in many of the works—most notably Gomezʼs Lorem Ipsum Painting (Citations of Thirst)— appears to have a compositional rather than signifying function. Yet, if read, these phrases, like garbled news, suggest vague and poetic dangers.
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