Let’s dive in with “Infinite Caca” — my first encounter with Tita Cicognani’s deliriously polymorphous practice. The centerpiece of the installation-cum-immersive environment was Grotto Tub (Hot Tub #2) (2022), a self- contained, slightly hallucinatory pleasure pod elaborated around an inflatable tub. Its liquid interior was rendered kaleidoscopic by its mirrored Plexiglas walls and outline of LED lights that modulated seductively to a droning soundtrack, transforming the whole thing into a type of large-scale mood ring. By contrast, its exterior was a more roughly hewn assemblage upholstered with rock- printed fabric punctuated by clip art motifs of doves, butterflies, and flower petals — a syrupy veneer disrupted at various points by visible plumbing pumping out darkly colored liquids (a video looping nearby of two figures mud wrestling in a kiddie pool underscored the scatological punchline). The overall effect is not unlike what would happen if an abandoned Playboy Mansion dip pool somehow evolved inexplicably into a semi- sentient digestive system.

As this implies, the whole thing was “alive” — or at least fully operational, deploying its glitzy kitsch as more than just a purely optical lure. Indeed, for the opening event at Leroy’s, the Los Angeles artist-run gallery/event space/ speakeasy (housed in the former Thanh Vi restaurant in Chinatown and accessible via the rear parking garage), guests were encouraged to bring a bathing suit and towel. For those who did not but nevertheless fell under the thrall of the grotto’s gravitational pull, a tidy changing area with complimentary towels was provided. When I arrived, several nubile attendants were drying off after a preliminary dip — art-school naiads basking in post-bathing bliss. A parched, tired, and somewhat burnt-out art fair traveler, I was mesmerized by their abandon and tempted into following their lead by the still-rippling surface of the water and the bobbing eyes of a pair of inflatable swans that seemed to both beckon me into the technicolor maw and mock my modest reticence. I still regret not taking them up on the invitation.

The disarming qualities of certain specific material interventions are for me the clearest through line animating the output of the New York–born, Los Angeles–based artist. It has evolved as a sustained exploration of kitsch vernaculars, topmost among them the “hot tub” and its historical embeddedness in bad 1970s design, swinger parlance, and gay bathhouses; the accoutrements of kink and BDSM (a subculture she also remains personally invested in); as well as aspects of Catholicism (specifically the aesthetics of its attendant merch) woven in with representations of religious ecstasy and alien abduction fantasies. These may seem like disparate points of reference, but they are linked by the ability of inanimate matter to elicit a bodily response (pain, aversion, disgust, arousal, titillation, rapture, or, most deliciously, a mixture of all), and through that transport us into heightened experiences and perhaps even alternate states of consciousness. As she notes in our coast-to-coast call, “I’ve always been drawn to materials that are intended to look natural but failing miserably at that. For instance, something that looks like crocodile skin — it’s trying to mimic this naturally occurring phenomenon but in a way that perverts it in a completely dumb and clear way.”

Η συνέχεια εδώ.