Review: Dorian Gaudin, ‘Climax Change’

François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, USA

June 28 – August 3, 2019

As the sole visitor of François Ghebaly on a recent Thursday morning, I met a room of contrasting shades of green: verdant, neon, lush and sickening. Two floor sculptures - one a set of cedar trees over mechanical guts veiled by a rolling hill of fiberglass, the other a rubber fern with a metal accordion stem aimed at an acrylic panel - foregrounded twisted electric green aluminum underneath a corroded plow. My slow wandering through the space appeared to trigger soft clicking noises from low-lying sensors attached to traveling wires, which in turn appeared to cause the floor sculptures to attack themselves with unguessable time delays. The exhibition, it seemed, was meeting me back.

This was Climax Change, Dorian Gaudin’s ambitious seven-piece installation in Los Angeles. With only four other solo exhibitions behind him, the Brooklyn-based artist has developed a novel approach toward representing a long-standing human approach towards Nature, that omnipresent thing which currently keeps many of us up at night (including, no doubt, the artist himself): as a mechanized theater of inexplicable feedback systems, further complicated by the attendance of a confused visitor. 

My one-on-one engagement with Climax Change was about as mystifying as those journeys made into uncharted territories embarked upon by those hoping to conquer them. Just as an impetuous colonist explicates the internal operations of the New World to render them useful, so too did I hope to quickly discover how my presence within this exhibition was causing its few elements to inflict self-harm. However, in this garden of the 21st century, the two floor pieces - titled Collateral Stimulus and Personal Goals - can only be approached with watchful deference, like those rare flowers held deep within conservatories to which people travel great distances in the hopes of witnessing their putrid blooms. Though Gaudin exposed their mechanical assemblages and nylon roots against vibrantly stained tubular steel, their underlying principles, wants and needs remained no less enigmatic. 

The remaining elements in the space were concerningly inanimate. The four wall-mounted pieces lingered in the margins as one might stage pigmented houseplants despite their improper maintenance, while the ceiling piece, Gloom Loom, cast no shadow on the ground, but instead an imagined haze with proportions difficult to gauge (How many look to smog-tinged fluorescent sunsets as omens? How do we connect what we do down here with what happens up there?).

Climax Change is a missive to all of us at the summit of an environmental crisis, reminding its viewers that while we may acknowledge ourselves as a virus to the world’s biomes, there is still so much they may never reveal about themselves, even against our most modern forms of inquiry. Against an inundation of messages about a collapsed future from a collapsing present, we constitute a global village seeking desperately to learn what makes their sensors click. 

Without a field guide or an instruction manual, I remain uncertain about exactly how my presence affected Climax Change. The exhibition did, however, cause me to exercise a tendency rarely associated with the common colonist: to accept the unknown as simply that.