CANADA presents Michael Mahalchick’s third solo show, For What It’s Worth, which, without a doubt, is a garish and friendly reminder for everyone of how useful the useless can be, running now until February 22nd.  Mahalchick’s dense, found-object assemblages are deftly edited into the gallery’s two rooms, leaving just enough space to muse in between the gut-punchy and bold works.  Standing in front of the pieces is acrobatic for the eyes.  One must train oneself to even see an object that, on some level, one is not willing to assign value to, or has thrown away and forgotten at some point.  In this way the assemblages really shift before the eyes as the psychic weight of balding fabrics, capitalist iconography and cheap jewelry comes in and out of focus, in and out of recognition.  In addition, the artist has also collected abandoned paintings, shredded ribbons, scabby branches, used rubber gloves, cuddly stuffed animals, glass vials, abused cosmetics, and many unrecognizable partial objects, and he has fixed them together with persistent, hawk-eyed care and endearingly fragile craft. 

In the cacophonous You Want This?, I recognized, buried in the work, the same tiny tube of bergamot lotion that I brought home from a hotel in Budapest.  Aside from wondering at how far and wide Mahalchick must have scavenged for this orphanage of objects, I wondered also at how clamorous and important they became in new contexts.  When my lotion tube is empty, or is replaced by another, I will toss it out and implicate myself immediately in Mahalchick’s palette, which has an appetite for the habitually careless relationship we have with the objects of desire in our lives.   Mahalchick muckrakes with glee and pathos.  In Too Hot For You, packaging for a penis ice-cube mould is taped to a wall-mounted table-top.  Who among us has floated one of these “cubes” in a punch bowl for friends?  Did it chill your drink and get you hot?  And how many times did it work before we got tired of its novelty? Mahalchik points out that we desert our bodies all the time, recasting our parts into gimmicky commodities, which we eventually give up as well.  Mahalchick needles with a dark, absurd sense of humor.  In Don’t Look At Me,  a hat dangles by a string attached to a found (and mediocre) painting of a nude female.  A turgid pink bead and a downy feather attached to the inside of the hat transform it into a euphemized vagina, the fanny pack glued over the nude’s eyes becomes the window to her soul.  It is a creepy effect that also allows room for humor, and a sense of relief in knowing that we are all guilty of contributing to the beautiful mess around us.  A tone of forgiveness lies in Mahalchick choice to work with our cultural sloppy seconds; his sophisticated show doubles as trash compactor and redemption center of sorts. 

Images: You Want This? (2008); Don’t Look at Me (2008).  Courtesy the artist and Canada.