Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Pope.L
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
Chicago, IL: Corbett vs. Dempsey (Exhibition: Pope.L: No Thing Skin Sets)
86%
I Machine. 2014-2022. 2 overhead projectors, acrylic and graphite on canvas, speakers, microphone, chair, post-its, solenoid, tubing, gralab 451 photo timer, 2 glass trays, funnel with container, wooden box, wooden armature, painter’s tape, threaded rod, bucket, water, plastic letters, coins, acrylic, graphite, petroleum jelly, lock
This artwork is two overhead projectors (one of which is nonfunctional and painted black) stacked on top of each other on top of a chair on top of a wooden box, with an enormous ganglion of tubing coming out the back of a petri dish that's filled with water plus some little black letters like alphabet soup, and the contents of this petri dish are what's being overhead-projected onto the gallery's wall, and every once in awhile a high loud beep will come through some speakers that are sitting on the ground to either side of the machine, and when this happens an ugly metal apparatus will spit more water into the petri dish, which makes the letters whoosh around. There are also Post-it notes with abject little drawings stuck all over this assemblage and the floor of the gallery; the wires that power everything are just thrown on the ground, willy-nilly. One way to think of I Machine is as the "dirty" version of Choir, Pope.L's similarly water-based Whitney Biennial installation from 2017. Another, better way to think of I Machine is as totally fucked up and inexplicable, a harking back to 90s installation art à la, say, Mike Nelson, but somehow even more resistant to interpretation. This is an art of pure somatic engagement, made even more vexing by all the disjecta of reference and significance (the images on the Post-its; the scrambled letters in the dish). Pope.L is a master of making the intricately composed seem not just found or random but almost violently bereft of order. In the case of I Machine, this is partly due to the fact that key formal components, like the way the tubing clusters or the placement of the Post-its, are essentially stochastic, but also because each individual structural element of the piece (projectors, water-pouring doohickey, drawings) are so intensely undeveloped and ugly, while the ensemble overall is in possession of an indefinable but overbearing internal logic. (TFS, 2026)
Chicago, IL: Corbett vs. Dempsey (Exhibition: Pope.L: No Thing Skin Sets)
71%
Swiss People are Lonly. 2018. Acrylic on television with looped video
Swiss People is connected to Pope.L's somewhat famous Skin Set textual drawings on paper. These feature nonsensical racial classifications (i.e. Purple People Bust a Nut in the Gravy and We Learn Something). Like those, this piece doesn't ever explain the relationship between its slapdash form (garish block letters, paint that's badly and thinly and inconsistently applied) and the weirdly precise, meaningless observation about ethnicity that's scrawled on its surface. Swiss People goes further than many of the other Skin Set pieces, however, by incorporating an old sideways TV with its wires hanging down. Playing on the TV was a video I ought to have watched more closely, but I didn't notice anything in its anodyne supermarket ads that seemed to illumine or even connect to the work's overall "thesis" about the Swiss — and besides, the acrylic paint thrown onto the face of the monitor discourages close looking. This discouragement is the work's accomplishment over and above the other Skin Set drawings: its painted, moving image, and literal-object elements are so ambivalently related, but also so densely layered, that they negate each other, making the work almost impossible to actually look at and so leaving you (the viewer) with little to consider besides the pointless racial phrase (whose pointlessness is underscored by a typo, "lonly"). It is an open question as to whether this ugly obliquity, though an accomplishment, is entirely aesthetically justified, either in itself or in comparison to the rest of the Skin Set series, which play with the conventions and expectations of drawings whereas Swiss People sort of just plays with itself. (TFS, 2026)