At Crawl Space: Love children free themselves from the Cross

Raised Catholic, Jeffry Mitchell understands the ecstasy of suffering. He knows the virtue of denial, that each act of rejecting pleasure produces it, and each battering of the body’s dreams earns emeralds and rubies for a crown in heaven.

But what if a Catholic voluptuary rejects the Cross? In Mitchell’s words:

A feather, a skull, the moon and stars, a man (?) and half a lady, crystals and sequins and the grandchildren of Piero Manzoni and Allan Kaprow. There’s something about magic, Hippie magic, and the way the LOVE CHILDREN freed them selves from the cross and sought spiritual expression through ancient forms other than the Christian one that resonates through this show for me. It’s very much my story, and the story I look for. It’s the story that I can’t help but see and although I claim that each pair of works in this show found each other on their own, the instant I see these works I bring stories to each of them, helplessly, naturally.

Mitchell curated Call and Response at Crawl Space with an eye out for inner magic, for spiritual passion expressed through the body.

Jack Ryan’s moon ringed with cheap florescence (Image, detail) brings to mind William Carlos Williams’ poem, The Attic Which Is Desire:

the unused tent

of

and day–

Here

is

transfixed.