Angelina Gualdoni: Demo
Realizing that hubris lies at the root of civilization’s “achievements,” many recent artists eschew modernist claims to artistic truth in favor of more modest and contingent statements. Angelina Gualdoni’s six carefully crafted paintings at Vedanta all depict the 2000 demolition of the Horizons Pavilion at Disney’s Epcot Center while John Wanzel’s 13 pieces at Dogmatic explore our interstate highway system. Both 27-year-old artists critique the notion that technology makes life better.
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The show is not without humor. The largest painting, From the Minuscule to the Grandeur, shows the pavilion in its most diminished state, with only a fragment still standing–magnified to look mountainous. Contrasting order and chaos, Gualdoni makes the foreground fence and rectangles of the roof clean and fairly regular, but between the two the building is twisted and jumbled. In Surface Color Burst the collapsed right side of the roof ends in an intense jumble, almost as if the building were spouting multicolored flames. A blank white space in the orange wall in front of the building, into which paint drips, seems a painterly “mistake” mirroring the destruction of Disney’s “perfect” creation. Similarly, in four of the six paintings the foliage is smeared, in contrast to Gualdoni’s usual clean style.
Wanzel’s incomplete, hand-drawn map of I-55, Across the Land of Lincoln, Interstate 55 and Other, offers a highly personal, ambiguous view: curiously tentative, it presents the road as a thin charcoal line only faintly distinct from the drawing’s dark background. Most impressive visually are the two final pieces: large painted plaster models of stretches of I-55, Southern Section, Around Lexington, IL and Northern Section, Outside Odell, IL. They offer a fitting climax to the preceding texts, “I Like Ike” buttons, sound pieces, and photographs. Because we know the road continues far beyond the edges of the models, their square shape emphasizes the way our civilization breaks up land geometrically.
