SAN FRANCISCO — David Bayus has his media enjoyable whereas tweaking it too — in Efficiency Nervousness, an exhibition at Telematic, he recasts the basic Hollywood musical style and its related gender stereotypes. For the present’s eponymous 10-minute video centerpiece (2024), Bayus unspools a energetic, dark-edged, and playful mashup that refracts Artwork Deco and noir melodrama by means of the late-modern kinds of video video games, manga, and fantasy horror through Pc-Generated Imagery. Within the gallery’s small, moodily lit house, a pair of different objects — a single portray and a small statuette — hover close to the display, casting their very own dim glows and fitfully teasing further sides of the video’s voiceless narrative.
The video’s animated figures characteristic Alice in Wonderland- and Ubu roi-like heads, cartoony faces flashing broad expressions. These sit atop exoskeletal our bodies within the darker fantasy modes of H.R. Giger, Robocop, or Terminator — dynamic beautiful corpses generated through synthetic intelligence-enabled movement seize. Reversing typical damsel-in-distress rescues, it’s the heroine within the video who saves the day for each herself and a male protagonist, whose insecurities appear to get the higher of him whereas performing home chores. The characters’ uncanny impacts are usually not fairly feelings, however, reasonably, exaggerated caricatures à la each digitally drawn animations and old-time-y actors. The twilit interiors of each video world and gallery house, nevertheless — accompanied by ominous ambient undercurrents hovering beneath the soundtrack’s two classic track knockoffs — recommend that one thing emotional would possibly actually be at stake.
On a pedestal flanking the video, “Participation Trophy #1” (2023) — a 3D-printed sculpture of a cartoony humanoid determine jauntily holding its personal decapitated head — remembers a higher-end Disney present store memento, however the muted lighting but once more shifts the temper, showcasing the determine’s hanging, unnatural contortions frozen in a home dance scene taken from the video. On the wall flanking the video’s different edge, a biomorphic determine and a machine threaten to meld into each other within the Dalí-like portray “Division of Labor” (2024). The ensuing half-living equipment’s dormant tubing smolders just like the infrastructure of an unlit neon signal, furthering the noirish-ness of the exhibition. In some methods, the biomorphic fragment in “Division of Labor” and the androgynous humanoid of “Participation Trophy” transfer additional afield from extra binarily gendered figures, suggesting some higher “spinoff” which may occur past the frames of the video’s confines.
All through, Bayus works this ensemble of distinct but associated media works with nice facility, verve, and magnificence, whereas proposing an intervention on gender stereotypes. Although meant as honest inversion of social expectations, the video’s narrative nonetheless hews to a heteronormative schema in performing a easy gender function swap that however reinforces set classes reasonably than pursuing full-on paths of higher gender unfolding.
Maybe such defaults are a consequence of the usage of AI and its monitoring and regurgitation of established associations between formal parts and human ideas, such because the coding of sure bodily labors (e.g. cleansing vs. preventing) as “female” or “masculine.” Although the mixed outcomes of the exhibition’s items sidestep the obvious ideological pitfalls of gender relations, they don’t solely escape the orbit of default logics for social roles. In the end, Bayus demonstrates how up to date media can artfully signify and replicate the vexed social legacies of widespread cultural manufacturing in humorous and poignant vogue — however not learn how to shed them solely.
David Bayus, Efficiency Nervousness: Portray, Sculpture, and Movie, continues at Telematic (323 tenth Road, San Francisco, California) by means of November 9.