Installation view
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 3), 2007, acrylic on stretchers and canvas, 53 x 40 cm / 20,9 x 15,7 in.
Installation view
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 4), 2007, acrylic on stretchers and canvas, 51,6 x 40,5 cm / 20,3 x 16 in.
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 2), 2007, acrylic and wooden wedges on canvas, 51,5 x 41 cm / 20,3 x 16,1 in.
Installation view
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 7), 2007, acrylic on canvas, 51 x 44,5 cm / 20,1 x 17,5 in.
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 6), 2007, acrylic and plexiglass on canvas, 55 x 43 cm / 21,6 x 17 in.
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 5), 2007, acrylic on canvas, 55 x 40 cm / 21,6 x 15,7 in.
Installation view
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 1), 2007, acrylic on four stretchers, 51,5 x 40 x 7,5 cm / 20,3 x 15,7 x 2,9 in.
Installation view
Cyborg, 2007-2017, oil on canvas, video on monitor, colour, sound, 15‘52“, 231 x 216 cm
Detail from Cyborg, 2007-2017
Detail from Cyborg, 2007-2017
Installation view
Landscape, 2017, oil on canvas, 53,3 x 36,8 cm / 21 x 14.5 in.
Untitled (Garbage Bag Painting 8), 2007, acrylic on plastic foil, 43 x 43 cm / 16,9 x 16,9 in.
Installation view
Coke, 2007, acrylic and inkjet print on paper, 132 x 106,7 cm / 52 x 42 in.
Mirror, 2007, acrylic on Mylar, 151,1 x 120,6 cm / 59,5 x 47,5 in.
2007 – 2017
A few months ago, Christine Mayer sent me Trevor Shimizu’s PDF with available works. One of the photographs showed a wrapped black plastic bag in a corner, so I asked: “What is that?” Christine Mayer answered: “Untitled, 2008, the ‘garbage bag’ sculpture, does not exist anymore.” I didn’t think more about it until I was asked to write this short text about Trevor’s new exhibition 2007 – 2017 a week ago. New exhibition? What is the newness of the 2007 – 2017 show? Maybe we should not consider it as a new exhibition but rather as a rematerialized exhibition.
2007 – 2017 consists of several small works, that once were hiding inside Untitled, 2008. The ‘garbage bag’ sculpture was Shimizu’s contribution to the group show Workspace, where Josh Kline, Dean Kenning, Devon Costello, and Antoine Catala participated, at Galerie Christine Mayer back in 2008.
Christine Mayer may have mentioned that the plastic bag sculpture doesn’t exist, but its content does. The works in 2007 – 2017 have never seen the light of day since they left Trevor’s studio back in 2007/08. So, is this show an old bag of forgotten, abused, and mistreated works (those previously placed in a black plastic bag)? Some would argue yes. Would The hidden show, The aged show, The matured exhibition or The pickled show be more appropriate? Maybe. One could potentially claim that 2007 – 2017 is like ‘old wine in new bottles.’ The idiom of course refers to presenting something in a new or different way, often with the intention of making it seem fresh or innovative when, in reality, it is just a rehash or a repackaging of something that already exists or is well-known, but in this case, it is actually a matter of unpacking and opening up the bottle and pouring out the content.
The twelve Garbage Bag Paintings are abstract, partly destroyed, and a biting humor, a humor that mocks the seriousness of painting, is very present. Besides the paintings from the black plastic bag, the exhibition presents the two older works Coke, 2007 and Mirror, 2007 from about the same time when Shimizu started painting again, and finally the scribbled landscape idea Landscape, 2017, an early attempt that kickstarted the whole series relating to nature that the artist has made the last few years. And Shimizu has added yet another twist to the exhibition. Within the blank video painting from 2017—a work that usually shows the video (text) self-portrait Memoir—Shimizu has placed the video work Cyborg from 2007. When I first saw Cyborg – an obscure mashup and apocalyptic sci-fi parody of clips including a British-English natural history index lesson, a pizza slice screenplay voiceover, advertisements, a newspeak about geminoid’s rights in the future, a thinking-feeling-emotional-machine memory monologue, TV glitches, etcetera—I couldn’t help humming:
Lobotomy, lobotomy
Lobotomy, lobotomy
DDT did a job on me / Now I am a real sickie / Guess I’ll have to break the news / That I got no mind to lose / All the girls are in love with me / I’m a teenage lobotomy
I am still not sure why those lines sidetracked my brain. There is no logic nor explanation as to why I thought of Ramones’ song about a teenager who had a lobotomy because of the brain damage caused by overexposure to the modern synthetic insecticide D.D.T. Sometimes weird shit happens inside the brain – wires connect, disconnect, and make neural activity wander off to other spheres. It is as unexplainable as cyborgs and other aliens. Maybe I thought of the Ramones because of Cyborg’s fearless, punk, and primal attitude.
The Garbage Bag Paintings exhibition echoes Trevor Shimizu’s deadpan wit, playing with titles and words and reflects his formal experiments with painting between 2007-2017. The important experiments and different painterly expressions that Shimizu went through in those ten years shaped a strong bassline in the artist’s following ten years. Some of the works in 2007 – 2017 can be seen as predecessors for works made in 2017 or later.
The good thing about hiding paintings for 15 years, making them invisible for a while, is that gold nuggets may appear with time. Sometimes ‘the now’ is not ready for ‘the now.’ Sometimes works produced with immediacy and ‘nowness’ need to age before they become relevant as a ‘now.’ The discovery of old works can make them even stronger if they echo present works, hint at or link to later works, or even future historical events. I am not trying to paint Trevor Shimizu or the 2007 – 2017 exhibition into a Rembrandt corner of masterpieces, I simply want to address the interesting approach of hiding and recovering works. The ‘destroyed’ or ‘collapsed’ paintings that Shimizu produced in 2007/08 foretell the biggest financial crisis and art market collapse that we have experienced in the last 25 years.
The works belong to the anti-painting painting tradition. Shimizu pokes fun at the tradition of painting and works with multiple expressions and methods at the same time. Some might characterize them as abstract/figurative—they are—but I would tick the box of conceptual. To pull off the transformation of Untitled, 2008, the ‘garbage bag’ sculpture to 2007 – 2017 (2024) is simple, yet conceptual. Because of the long history of painting, it is almost impossible to make something new within this genre. Nevertheless, these early works capture the ‘I DON’T CARE’ attitude that plays with and rejects prior definitions of painting. Shimizu lets the process of the making of a work become a battlefield with its own rules hence without any rules. Like Late Works—the exhibition title of Shimizu’s first solo show at 47 Canal in 2012—the exhibition 2007 – 2017 is a self-ironic take on Shimizu’s own practice and role as an artist, and at the same time it points toward the artist’s own exhibition history at Galerie Christine Mayer—full circle—and particularly winks at the works produced around the time of Workspace as a sculpture.
Jacob Fabricius