California Is A Girl I Saw Dancing On A Bridge, the latest show at Gloss Gallery (4954 Ne 14th and Alberta) is the combined effort of Peter Hurley, Calvin Trezise, and Morgan Manduley. The project stemmed from an essay by Elizabeth Grosz in which she commented that "Art [is] the excessive composition of material elements that are always more than material." Like the fetish item: any item instilled by its owner with a value incongruous with its function, the art object is the manifestation of a cognitive value uncorrelated to the materials and means of its creation. With this in mind the artists each attempted to convey the meaning of: "California Is A Girl I Saw Dancing On A Bridge." Peter Hurley's drawings are message pulled up from his subconscious, day-by-day, layer-by-layer. "They are love letters from the edges of consciousness, a distillation of unforgotten memories. " Calvin Treazise's collages distort and reorganize pornographic images in order to represent the plurality of meaning and emotion such images conjure. By making use of the actual magazines and other pornographic material he is able to ground his work directly in the market. Finally Morgan Manduley's paintings and collage represent elements of both the other artist styles. The semiotics of a cowboy hat or waterfall drags into each peace the specificity of its unique meaning, which, in contrast with the other elements of the work capture the terseness, and intensity of our imagistic society.
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