Glory Hole at SPRING/BREAK

Glory Hole. What imagery do those words inspire? Most of you are thinking dirty thoughts right now, and that is just fine. Curators 1985 and Kelsey & Rémy Bennett presented a group exhibition with the same name at this year’s SPRING/BREAK Art Show at the historic Moynihan Station.

While the term “glory hole” has a pretty singular meaning, which you can search on Urban Dictionary if you are unsure, Rémy and Kelsey explained that its name, while coated in grandeur and majesty, could be digested in a variety of ways for the artists who partook in the show. However, a common thread that ties all of them together is the concept of looking into a scene that could be considered prurient and deeply personal.

Maria Candanoza’s wall of candy-colored post-its showed snippets of her Facebook conversations with her college boyfriend, all of which were connected by the word “you,” collaged into a bittersweet wall of disjointed memory.

Sorry Saints featured Kelsey Bennett’s chapel of holographic portraits of women armed with needles, shark fins and anal beads in a modern shrine to some three-eyed matriarch. Each portrait included an ‘offering’ for their goddess below.

Filmmaker Rémy and her partner Anna Del Gaizo showed clips of their film Eat Me, paired with the simulated bedroom of the film’s subject, a webcam girl who doubles as a serial killer. The viewer looks voyeuristically at a messy girl’s bedroom littered with the expected, as well as bloodied rags, Satanic shrines and male porn cut outs.

 
(left) Sam Cannon, (right) Kelsey Bennett

GIF artist Sam Cannon showed a set from her Mutation series, focused on uncomfortably digitally mutated human figures, from a woman with multiple sets of eyes to a tangle of torsoless legs, all twitching in an endless loop.

James Concannon’s heavily dark and perverse pieces signified his version of Hell, surrounding himself and the viewer with mementos of sin

Brooke David deconstructs the meat of dead animals and arranges them before painting a zoomed in frame, which is hard for the viewer to decipher upon first glance. The flesh-colored carcass ends up looking like abstracted sexual organs.

Tafv Sampson and Nick Des Jardin recreate a 1970s era den with Tafv’s pin up photos and Polaroids on the wall. Footage shot at the photo shoots, unbeknownst to the subjects, played on VHS in front of a reclining chair.

All of the artists’ work is neatly summarized in an art box for purchase at Candanoza’s LES store OBJECT_IFY 139, filled with mementos signifying of each artist’s work in Glory Hole.

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story / Tiffany Diane Tso