Purposeful Derangement
In connecting the works of Tobias Brill, Chris McGee and Wheez Von Klaw to the word “deranged,” I don’t mean to suggest any sociopathic tendencies. The derangement to which I refer is specifically artistic and intentional. While operating in uniquely personal ways, all three share certain intriguing sensibilities and, I think, a common sort of compulsion toward their work. A drawing mania. A willful stumbling through fields of anxiety. A concession to spontaneity and ambiguity. A derangement verging on bliss.

Tobias Brill’s line drawings are intriguing for the wide gamut they employ between concision and density. A work like Ka Blam! is realized with a minimum of lines and no shading or other additional drawn aspects, so much so that it almost appears unfinished. Yet it still manages to suggest an expansive narrative within its modest plane. Other works by Brill operate in a manner so overwrought the line turns into a doodling density that can barely be contained.

Chris McGee—who has dubbed his own practice “doodleglyphics”— combines drawing, painting and collage into a personal mythology of symbols and characters. Like Brill’s work, McGee’s appears in a constant state of transformation and mutation. Often realized on rough, untreated surfaces, McGee’s works play off an intentionally primitive aspect, but their psychological depth is entirely contemporary. Cynical allusions to technology (and technological offspring, like contemporary warfare) are a persistent theme throughout McGee’s work.

The work of Wheez Von Klaw, on the surface, has a cleaner appearance, with it’s strong illustrative base and allusion to comic art, but still shares with Brill and McGee a drawing foundation and a darkly-humorous sensibility. Von Klaw is merciless in skewing pomposity and delirious in the application of gallows humor. Violence is not so much a subtext for Von Klaw as it is a means to comically exaggerate a sensibility or draw an image out to a point of visual absurdity.

Deeply dark humor prevails throughout the work of all three artists, creating a strange psychological space in which a buoyant ebullience and a grim sensibility co-exist as mutually enabling forces. Morbid fascinations, pop culture references, deep-seated anxieties, sexual humor, the absurdity of simply being alive, and persistent self-deprecation texture the work of all three artists. While entirely distinctive to themselves, the work of Brill, McGee, and Von Klaw cross numerous shared paths and often co-exist in the same psychological terrain.
The derangement on display here is an intentional, imaginative space. It is a conscious intent, but it is textured heavily by unconscious impulses. It is a posture that liberates the drawn line that each engages in their work and allows it to pursue whatever wild tangent springs up in the moment. Beheadings. Mutations. Dark underbellies. Psycho-sexual creatures. A world gone awry. All lovingly rendered for your promiscuous visual pleasure.

Good times, good times.

John Massier
Visual Arts Curator

Some publications related to this event:
PURPOSEFUL DERANGEMENT - 2006
March, 2006 - 2006
April, 2006 - 2006