Sofie Fatouretchi & Luna Mae Heflin: Stunted

this is disgusting, i am disgusting

Stunted features works either painted or sculpted whose respective installation is inspired loosely by a passage from a Mike Kelley text entitled We Communicate Only Through Our Shared Dismissal of the Prelinguistic, wherein Kelley beleaguers an eight-year-old’s artwork as having a theme that is too, as he proceeds to denigrate it, “stunted” and imbued with “saccharine vulgarity”. The work in question’s motif is, initially innocuously enough, a Halloween pumpkin, prompted by the teacher as an assignment pertaining to the holiday, yet Kelley sees the student’s obedience as much beneath their age level, and likens it to perhaps what a three-year-old were to draw. Kelley says the student “should have moved beyond this kind of imagery a long time ago”, and equally, reprimands the teacher for purposefully encouraging this kind of pseudo-art: for it is the cliched depiction of the terrible (in this case, a jack-o-lantern), that masks the true terror of actual interior emptiness.

Sofie Fatouretchi and Luna Heflin’s exhibition intuitively inquires about the inadvertent obligations which are projected upon anybody subjecting themselves, willingly or not, to this discourse — of accommodation, aiming to please; and seeks to exist as an active construct against these flattened emotional climates.