Teen Choice

Justin Beal
Bjorn Copeland
Stanya Kahn
Mike Kelley
Calvin Marcus
Will Milner
Carter Mull
Zak Smith
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

Organized by Drew Heitzler

July 31 – August 27 Opening reception Sunday, July 31, 6pm – 8pm

In Goethe’s Faust, Homunculus, the preserved brain cryonically in search of corporeal life and on the way to its anticipated rebirth as mega-hunk, merges suicidally with the sea in a literal enactment of Nautilus, thus flipping through two channels of creation: quake and surf. California, that other coast where Faust would land a century and a half later fits right in here, as the notion of an endless summer becomes a ritual repetition and shock temporality of an eternal teen age: surf and quake.

The teenager likes to be different, like everyone she likes to be like. As such the choices she flips through are kept under remote control. This is a good idea, as the teen age is a kind of converter, the teenager rebounding back and forth between extremes and short attention spans in an attempt to mix two segregated sides of parental identification into the assimilated identity of the group member. The teen is thus an age of twist and shout in which the tidal wave of early identification, sublimation, and super-egoic sadism must be libidinally bound up by the group, for only the group’s greater body can recover the loss of the maternal body. As such it is the group that absorbs the shocks and tremors against which the paternal could never be quake nor water proofed.

Goethe believed that cultural achievements of great minds rely always on a connection to a primal and eternal adolescence. With this is mind, the experiment is on in California, where the dual recesses of identification that the endless summer prolongs is the invention of the no-future that Hegel reserved specifically for America. Quake and wave pack the charge, running down modernist channels in order to seek an affirmation of the teen age: A teen choice necessary for a traversal of the adolescent modes of existence through which we might survive our ever increasing technological immortality.

For additional information and press inquiries please contact Christine Nichols or Erica Voetsch at the gallery: info@cnicholsproject.com

c. nichols project is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon-6pm. Please check the gallery website for details and additional programming or call 310-915-1930 during gallery hours.