The Chicken Or the Egg…

Ashley Kaye and Robert P Gordon hail from the Lehigh Valley in Eastern Pennsylvania. For most natives of this Northeastern region, the “South” conjures up images from country music videos: billowing American flags, cherry pies, cowboy boots, and pick-up trucks. But, for these transplants, the quiet woods of Northwest Arkansas provide shelter from pressures of gender conformity and religious conservatism. In nearby forests they stumble upon things that spark memory and tease the appetite. Rob and Ashley mix discovery with conscious arranging, exploring the permeable boundary between abandon and control. Moving to the rural South has put them in touch with aesthetic influences that resonate with their interests in memory, gender fluidity, and the body. The iconography of the South appears in their pulpy photographs of bologna sandwiches and glossy hotdogs on cornflower-blue gingham. Ashley’s work evokes the bold postmodern hedonism of advertisements that treat the South as brand: think Country Crock or Smucker’s. More relevant to Rob’s work is the Southern Gothic tradition, as his photographs arrest objects in states of decay, blending vitality with morbidity. For both artists, distance from their origins—temporal as well as spatial—has made confrontation with the past more fruitful. Here, they have found space for their queer partnership, which revolves around comfort and acceptance. Within this relationship, they also find the safety to critique and appear in each other’s art.

Delta, by Robert P Gordon, is an anthology of memory work. Inspired by recollections of childhood excursions to lakes and woods, Rob’s work reflects the Southern Gothic’s focus on landscapes saturated with history. In one photograph, a boot dangles before a tree branch, the rubber sole facing the spectator. The same grey and green as the foliage behind it, the boot is almost camouflaged; but the taut shoelace it hangs from cuts the image, creating uncomfortable tension. While stillness prevails, many photographs convey a sense of suspended agitation: in one, a boat’s motor, partly obscured by murky water, looks about to rumble into action. Similarly, images of slight touch suggest sexual arousal but not its fulfillment. Earthworms on a groin covered by white cotton underwear remind us of death as well as pleasure. This image recalls an oft-cited impression in William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury: a young girl, Caddy, muddies her underwear climbing a tree. The memory of her soiled drawers stretches across the years, tethering her brothers, Benjy and Quentin, to this particular childhood moment. This elastic power of memory shapes Rob’s work in Delta as his process moves him back and forth across time. Encounters with objects in the natural world—a pile of leaves, a spider’s web—spark involuntary memories, which he then focuses on and consciously pursues in staging, photography, and collage. Like the deer antlers half-submerged in pond murk in one of his pieces, these memories thrust themselves forward through the sensory fabric of the world and, alternately, recede into the unconscious. His work is about tracing them back and, in the same gesture, freeing himself from pressures that made the original experiences difficult to begin with. 

The most telling resonance between Glut and Guzzle and Delta is the way both set the viewer on edge by taking the trappings of comfort and nostalgia and pushing them into disgust and nausea. Clicking through the images of “Delta” feels, at first, like watching a slideshow of someone’s decades-old summer vacation photographs. Snapshots of picnics, beers, makeshift steps descending to a lake’s edge. A dead fly in a honey-color liquid seems the perfect metaphor for the longing to stop time. But the sequence of images increases our unease, as figures of death gradually pop out of the photographic flatness. A faded photograph of a boy holding his daily catch of fish on a string gives way, a few frames later, to a jagged statue of bright green fish skewered together, like a macabre scaffold superimposed on another faded lake photograph. Advancing a few more slides, the viewer confronts the most jarring image in Delta. Rob’s bare shoulders and head are pressed by anonymous hands into a mound of dirt and earthworms that squirm in his open mouth. Grimacing, Rob submits to this grotesque planting, his eyes taking in the hands, the worms, the viewer—all with a look of absolute knowing. This photograph invites comparison with two from Glut and Guzzle, both of which feature Rob’s neck and face smeared in food. In one, his face is covered in dark red berry juice, and his hand obscures his mouth while more berries squeeze through the creases between his fingers. If Ashley’s running egg yolks recall squandered fertility, the berry smear suggests menstrual blood. In the other, Rob’s face is caked in hot-pink, green, and peach-tinted icing, while his head and eyes tilt backward. In both, Rob’s appear to have rolled back into his head in ecstasy or a zombie-like trance.

The images register total abandon to the enjoyment of appetite and, oddly, submission to the artist’s control. Holding in mind the model’s patience and the subject’s enjoyment, the viewer sees a strange blend of concentration and surrender. At the same time, the heavy iconography feminizes the subject through the connections to menstruation and wedding cake. The unnerving effects of these photographs, like the wormy one from “Delta,” come from their tense juxtaposition with elements that are so familiar to a conservative sense of American life and gender performance. From the picnics and milkshakes that recall a white, middle-class 1950s idealism to the camping excursions where boys learn to be boys, these collections evoke heteronormative utopias. Whether these settings are more “Southern” than they are simply American is a difficult question to answer, but it is through their detour to the literal and fantastic South that Ashley and Rob thwart that particular brand of utopia. They do so by staging and exploding the body’s desires and limits, especially its appetite for food and its final condition as food.