Poisonous Harmony 2020

Poisonous Harmony

In a bold fertile commingling of poison and pleasure Poisonous Harmony offers a sprawling vision of life and death, sex and danger, a current day paradoxical paradisiacal garden. Conceived and executed under the condition of the 2020 worldwide pandemic, the work is at once fragmentary and cohesive, presenting a rich dynamic of conflict, indulgence, and inexplicable harmony.

The most beautiful things can often kill you. Illustrating this paradigm, human forms are spliced and intercut with a variety of natural forms, all of which are potentially lethal: the poisonous pitohui bird; the amygdalin-laced apricot; the highly toxic yellow dart frog; the aptly named ‘murder hornet’; the fatally urushiol-laden unprocessed cashew nut; the wild mushroom, alternately utilized as medicine, hallucinogen, and poison; the fatally intoxicating buttercup; the intricately patterned, but venomous cone snail; and the oyster, obsessively hoarded during the 1918 influenza epidemic, at once a carrier of the symbolically sacred pearl and the most deadly seafood-borne pathogen on earth. Optically spherical pearls emblemize nature, industry, and a multiplicity of ideals, while the Venetian grotto chair, artfully modeled after the scallop shell, offers a rich symbol of eroding civilizations and the ubiquity of the Anthropocene.

In the arresting landscape between the two grotto chairs, the pearl alternately serves as an absorptive presence, a surface for lounging, a recurring object that appears to have been either delicately placed or casually strewn and hovering above a Venus-like torso in lieu of a head. The span of the painting itself seems to exemplify the interstitial space inhabited by shells, an area that is neither life nor death, ocean nor land: a richly shifting present between varied histories and imagined futures.

The work notably interacts with Rogers’ GODOG series, comprised of sculpture, neon, and video art highlighting diverse identities and the evolution of gender. Figures such as the Hello, provocative Pussy Buddha, a languorous reimagining of the classical Sleeping Hermaphroditus, an androgynous dual-faced angel, and incarnations of phallic fetish figures appear in various states of candor and poise, mourning and bliss, isolation and company.

Aesthetically redolent of the vibrant, imaginative world-building of Hieronymus Bosch, Poisonous Harmony conjures a wonderland of contradictions. Even the dominant color, a reinvention of chrome yellow pigment, a highly toxic favorite of Van Gogh’s, has historically been used to signal both danger and the divine and was once culturally heralded as the color ‘associated with all that was bizarre and queer in art and life.’ Encapsulating a myriad of perceptions, Poisonous Harmony invites the viewer to a world at once Edenic and bewildering, rife with things that fester and flourish, harm and delight, a garden of earthly delights that might very well kill you. —A.Miller