Dave McKenzie describes the title for his current show, Screen Doors on Submarines, by saying that it makes about as much sense as America does right now, what with the economic and military situations that seem to go ‘up and down, up and down, up and down' endlessly and perhaps irrationally.  Rather than shrug his shoulders at this perceived nonsense, McKenzie's work is engaged and elegant, embracing on all corners the feasible, irrational, unseemly and everyday.

The concise selection of objects in the gallery are both new and old and old and reworked.  On one end of the gallery, a Tecsonic four-band double cassette recorder plays Barack Obama's now familiar ‘Audacity of Hope' speech.  A disassembled cardboard refrigerator box is lying in front of the boom box setting the scene for a potential break dance.  On the opposite wall, there is a video of an eerily empty newsroom.  The anchor's swivel chair is spinning, spinning, spinning.

There is another refrigerator box.  It is standing upright - with plastic wrapped around it - there is another unwrapped on its side.  There is a set of screen doors leaning against the wall with the perennial question, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go?' cut out of the screen.  There is a reworking of a video from 2000 entitled, Edward and Me.  The version in the exhibition faces a corner so that from one end of the room all one sees is reflected blue and orange light flickering against the wall.  The video itself is McKenzie himself dancing in a perpetual loop in front of a convience store.

The objects, all in their different manners, explore the way the individual, in this case the artist, relates and reacts to society.  The push and pull of this relationship is very elegantly diagramed in the two Open Letters that are tacked on the wall. Is addressed to the driver of a car which the author (signed Dave McKinsey) claims nearly hit him as he was crossing the street.  The author of the letter is angry and has been affronted although he closes the letter by saying that he forgives the driver.  The next letter is addressed to the driver of a car that almost hit the author (again signed Dave McKinsey) because he had wrongfully jaywalked into the street.  He expresses sincere remorse and says repeatedly that he wishes he could say it was the last stupid thing that he will ever do but knows that most likely it is not.

- Nancy Lupo

(Images top-bottom:  Dave McKenzie, Screen Doors on Submarines (installation views), 2008.  Courtesy the Artist and CalArts,  Redcat Gallery.)