Antoine Catala. Emobot (Teacher), 2014; powder-coated aluminum and steel, computer, sound system, TV; video, color sound, 13:00; 71 x 21 x 18 in.; edition of 3.

Catala’s sculpture creates abstracted prototypes of human-robot blends, searching for unlikely pockets of emotion within the rigid boundaries of the technological. He uses technology as a tool for the production and replication of emotion. The most captivating issue in Battlestar Galactica and in Catala’s work can be found in the difficulties humans have in deciphering how to treat these technological models. Should the Cylons be treated like any other malfunctioning, dangerous machine? Are they simulacra of humans? Should they be considered an improvement on the human prototype, or rather as a treacherous blend of straightforward mechanical logic and emotionally manipulative tactics?

The labor of such a dilemma is written across the visage of Catala’s Emobot (Teacher) (2014), a CGI video of a bald, Caucasian child whose rubbery flesh only barely contains hyper-realistic round eyeballs and aggressive dentures that threaten to escape its face. The avatar vacillates between different declarations, including: “I feel dead… I’m alive…” In Catala’s fantasy, which is the avatar? If viewers use Catala’s prototypes to descend into the imaginative realm his pieces suggest, they can’t be sure either.

Antoine Catala. Feelings on the Table, 2014; powder-coated steel, wood, polycarbonate, copper, fur, sand, polystyrene, resin; 37 x 29 x 29 in.

The artist was present when I visited the gallery. Off in the corner, he tinkered with a MacBook and a pile of wrenches, cords, and expensive equipment, performing some adjustments on Emobot (Student) (2014). This robotic structure has a balloon-like membrane that inflates like a lung; a hard pink crescent inside performs a series of flips on a pivot, and then the membrane deflates, sucking itself around the crescent like a shiny cassock of skin. As the artist worked, I walked over to an inverted pyramid pedestal with a seafoam-and-white grid atop it. “You can touch those,” the artist pointed out. “Do what you want with them.” I found a series of small, textured objects on the pedestal: kinetic sand, a hard, thick piece of frosted glass, and a cluster of small blue balls of hard clay. As I fingered the clay, I flashed back to a childhood memory of rolling orbs out of Fimo clay. I was provoked into remembrance by the distinct feel of each of these objects: their weight, their smoothness, the way the sand bounced back when I poked it—as if it were alive. Sensation triggered memory, which triggered emotion. The most successful point of Catala’s new experiments is in this invitation to interact with that most basic technology of sensation. Catala acknowledges the treacherous and fascinating ground of the cyborg: when machines can feel, they fundamentally undermine our category of the “natural.” As we come into physical contact with technology, it becomes us and we it. In the quest to come to grips with such “new feelings,” there is nothing quite as real, nothing as disorienting, and nothing as affective as touch.

Antoine Catala: New Feelings is on view at 47 Canal through November 2, 2014. 

Trevor Shimizu. Again, 2014; installation view, 47 Canal. Easter Bunny, 2013; oil on canvas. Times Square Family, 2013; oil on canvas. Goofy, 2013; oil on canvas. Courtesy of 47 Canal.

The paintings themselves are cursory in the way masturbation often can be: Shimizu barely paints at all. Consisting of a few impulsive, gestural strokes, sometimes built up in muted hues but often left against a stark white canvas, they flesh out fleeting moments. Shimizu uses painting as a fast way to get his ideas down, and the results are weird, bleak little snapshots. These quick scenes seem ephemeral, somewhat out of reach. Shimizu’s simplicity skimpily clothes the intangible.

Rachel Mason’s Starseeds at envoy enterprises attempts to invoke another kind of “beyond”—one that, though it appeals to transcendence, might present an unlikely key to Shimizu’s mundane universe. For this exhibition, Mason has sculpted an army of dolls in the likeness of earthly celebrities that the artist feels belong to an alternate dimension. Mason describes her process as a kind of New Age magic, summoning the likenesses out of intuition. She arrives at her “starseeds” by using “only the subliminal logic of my fingertips to guide my choices of humans.” Mason’s dolls make for bad caricatures of the celebrities for whom they are supposed to serve as surrogates, almost as if the signal from Mason’s “higher plane” had gotten warped as it channeled through her. Both Shimizu’s and Mason’s exhibitions harness what is deeply creepy and fetishistic about the handmade. Mason’s dolls are the labors of fetishization, whereas Shimizu’s porn paintings capture the embarrassing consumption of it.

Rachel Mason. Starseeds, 2014; mixed media; installation view, envoy enterprises, New York City. Courtesy of the Artist and envoy enterprises.

Mason’s work is unflinchingly fantasy-oriented, and the installation is loaded with the delightfully obvious symbolism and spiritual self-indulgence so characteristic of New Age metaphysics. The starseeds hang throughout the gallery on fishing line as though soaring through the air, or hover clothed in cloaks of broken mirror slices, sloppily glued together. Meanwhile, a recorded album of songs sung by the artist, each dedicated to a different starseed, pumps through the exhibition space, and an accompanying music video features the artist dressed as one of her dolls, rocking back and forth amid her creations. One has to laugh as well as cringe.

Shimizu’s jokes and Mason’s dorky seriousness both appear to stem from the same self-conscious sincerity. Shimizu is not a slacker, though his paintings are certainly designed to make some people very mad. The genuine simplicity of his work is audacious, but Shimizu is not trying to get away with anything. His work is easily penetrated, and he lays inconsequential moments simply, self-deprecatingly bare. There is a certain rigor to Shimizu’s work, even as his paintings are designed to brush off  intellectual posturing; in his intent on using the canvas as a kind of sketchbook, he effectively deconstructs the act of painting, though without becoming abstract (his paintings still cling to the emotional territory of representation). This can be upsetting, as painting is traditionally associated with painstaking labor and, most of all, with time—long stretches of it. Again and Starseeds both deal in time, but it is the subjective, distorted time of our most private, interior aloneness.

Rachel Mason: Starseeds is on view through March 30th at envoy enterprises and  Trevor Shimizu: Again is on view through April 6 at 47 Canal. 

Xavier Cha, Untitled (2012). Exhibition Image. Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal.

As these unwavering gazes reside, impermeable, within video, I am able to indulge in the guilty pleasure of a prolonged stare. The dissociation of looking into a camera lens emboldens the performer to stare directly “at” me, and the distance cultivated by the barrier of the screen allows me to examine the subjects without penalty. We are allowed the illusion of looking deeply at each other as our gazes never meet.

We stare when something is different, and to scrutinize difference risks a kind of dehumanization. Stares immobilize, trapping the performer in a frozen moment within the isolated space of the unmitigated gaze. But in Untitled, a kind of hidden immensity is at work– something that is barely perceptible behind the surface of this seemingly basic exchange.

Xavier Cha, Untitled (2012). Installation view, HD video. Courtesy of the artist and 47 Canal.

A largely unpublicized fact about the exhibition (one that I learned third hand from a friend of a friend of one of the performers) is that Cha had her performers take Salvia and DMT – two naturally based drugs of varying hallucinogenic properties – before staring into the camera. This kind of secret information, this small and incidental knowledge, subtly yet radically changes the nature of our exchange. Cha does not mention in any of the narratives surrounding the exhibition that her performers are quietly undergoing intense interior experiences as they stare back at us. Though I feel that my focused gaze gives me access to some knowledge about the performers, our “contest” is characterized by private moments that I have no access to; that have nothing to do with me. Cha thus subverts the function of the stare as she affords her performers an agency that transforms them from art objects into engaged, radical subjects.

In the short email exchange that signifies their press release, 47 Canal notes that Cha’s digital stares suggest “the last breath of what we will know or remember” about the body, about subjectivity– and in this last sublime breath, the stark post-human landscape of video is tinged by a subtle interior trip on a natural drug. Technology is not the work’s focus, but an interface into a private experience of the physical body. Untitled presents the illusion of being a relational piece, one that might present an opportunity for a looking back and forth. But what we really see is a display of the performers’ intimacy with themselves within the texture of a technological broadcast. The almost imperceptible hint of these secrets prevents the viewer from truly knowing the subject of the work. Even within the illusion of hyper-proximity between subject and viewer that HD technology creates, the most precious intimacy cultivated by video is between the performer and his or her Self.

Xavier Cha is showing at 47 Canal through January 13.
47 Canal Street, 2nd Floor, New York NY 10002