Opening Friday, Oct. 9th, 6-8pm

Bessma Khalaf explores the outer limits of the body in a new series of drôle, single-image videos in her first solo show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts.

In Monument, the young, Iraqi-born artist poses heroically for several hours atop a life-size horse carved from ice until the watery stallion melts and collapses under the hot California sun. It’s an allegory of military exaltation and global warming, connecting the artist’s country of origin with her new homeland in a single entropic image stretched out for the purpose of one delicious pratfall.

In a second video titled Projection, the camera focuses on a succession of natural landscapes. Before the viewer has a chance to realize the images are not video direct but projections of found stills onto blank paper, a fist punches through from the other side. It’s a screwball attempt to disrupt the complacency of the traditional viewer-object relationship, which the artist connects with a long history of alienation from the land and the permission taken to abuse it.

In a third work, Ectoplasm, Khalaf draws inspiration from Victorian spirit photography, filming herself reflected in a black mirror, knitting with yarn that mysteriously unspools from her mouth. Nineteenth century photographers often depicted ectoplasm, or spiritual matter, with yarn and string as a way of proving that they had been in contact with the dead. Sometimes it would stream from the sitters’ orifices. Black mirrors have traditionally been used to represent portals to the spirit world. Today we might connect them with blank computer screens. While Khalaf ridicules the charlatanism in these campy traditions by knitting with the yarn, she uses in earnest the mirror’s reflectivity and the spirit of trying to manifest the unseen as yet another way to explore the body, the senses and the politics of perception through the terms handed down by art.

Ectoplasm is not the first time Khalaf has used art to cross back and forth from life to death. In her 2007 video Tree Painting, an homage to Christmas, the artist resurrects a dead pine tree in her studio by painting every needle green. Dry as a Yule log, the five-hour endurance test questions whether art as the Holy Grail can redeem life from death, free the land from the grip of industrial pollution and free the body from the cage of its senses. An image of the repainted tree returned to the landscape after the video’s completion answers those questions with a resounding bathos.

Befitting Khalaf’s dual heritage, Tree Painting, like many of her other videos, has one foot in the old world and one in the new. The slow-moving tempo’s resemblance to a still-photograph and its pursuit of revelation through physical hardship give it the character of a religious icon, while the studio hijinks place it squarely in the center of Bruce Nauman country. One could even suggest that the binge eating in her 2007 video This Land is My Land is a reaction to the anxiety caused by being in two places at once, Iraq and America, and the here and the hereafter. In This Land is My Land, the rail-thin artist devours a 13-foot-long chocolate landscape in one 22 minute sitting, spitting huge gobs of soil-colored pastry along the way. It’s a heroic display of appetite and ambivalence toward America, land of compulsive consumption, and a campy monster flick with Khalaf’s Middle Eastern profile dwarfing the baked landscape like some Babylonian Godzilla. Not only is the ancient world successfully bridged to the new, but as in all of her work the self-serious identity politics of high art are mercifully overshadowed by the shameless delights of the low.

Bessma Khalaf was born in Iraq and emigrated to San Diego, California in 1990 just before the first Gulf War. She received her MFA from the California College of Art in 2007 and currently maintains a studio in Oakland.

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In the project room, Ryan Boyle will exhibit recent sculptures and drawings. The enigmatic young artist from Portland makes small, minutely-detailed architectural objects that resemble plastic, wood and metal but are hand-cut and formed entirely from paper. They are quirky and charming and the craftsmanship is off the charts. Early models exploited vintage sheet music covers and a futuristic factory aesthetic to play with age and time. The new works explore sand paper, wood, roofing rocks and colored sand. The personal and the political, specifically the politics of the environment and waste, intermingle in strange and pleasing ways. A sense of time and meditation pervade the work, due not just to the prevalence of sand, but to the many long hours the artist puts in to resolve them. If a super-compulsive toy train hobbyist spent most of his waking hours watching psychedelic cartoons, this is the kind of thing he might turn out.