The Mind Crossed The Idea

Lindslee’s latest exhibition, The Mind Crossed the Idea, expands the artist’s repertoire of sculptural and painterly titillations writ large, menacing, and seductive. Ordinary objects, to which we pay scant attention, become total and unavoidable, as if, having been neglected for so long, now insist to be looked at with intense concentration, firing all our mental wirings, confounding our sense of scale, evoking unease, contempt, horror, awe, and sublimity.

Unlike, say, the gargantuan works of Pop artists, particularly Claes Oldenburg, whose usual choice of subject matter involved consumer goods and fast food, Lindslee teases with the surreal, shoving the meaning of the work into the absurd, in which a cross becomes studded with rotting teeth and molars (“Bite More than You can Chew”), a chorus of fishes reveal their tiny, gaping mouths as if about to break into an aria (“Something Fishy”), and an aerobics class student, straight out of the ‘80s with her spandex get-up and blue eyeshadow, holds tenderly a bird on her index finger (“The Tale of Fatima”).

The works are at once recognizable and alienating, at once familiar and strange. They are totems to what imagine as the good life: the butter on toast, the shucked oyster, the ability to choose our version of physical hardship through the lens of fitness. In a jolt of cognitive dissonance, some works short-circuit our expectations, just like the title which is an inversion of “an idea crossing the mind.” We imagine the mind lumbering along on a line of an idea, in the lookout for those gaps in which the bits and pieces of reality begin to buckle but have not yet collapsed.

Some works serve as objects of critique, assuming the mouth-watering, tempting quality of the food that they depict. Embedded in the tantalizing veneer of these works is a commentary on consumerism, middle-class fantasies, and the failures of neo-liberalism,  all the more heightened by the context of the gallery which is situated within a luxury shopping complex. The works attract so they may subvert.

Take, for instance, the cake paintings that bear the quips that the artist—or any artist for that matter—routinely hears with regard to their work: “I don’t get it.” “I like the colors.” “Please explain.” Lindslee wielded acrylic pigments like a pastry chef, applying them to a palette board, approximating the process of cake decoration. In doing so, the artist trims the distance between art and what it depicts, refusing to explain and give anything away, simply mirroring life in its complications, just like the cakes whose sweetness is both pleasure and poison.

-Carlomar Arcangel Daoana, Curator