Easthaus has collaborated with 49 Oak and is proud to present Crudely Stamp’d & Half Made Up. A duo exhibition of Isaac Kim (Brooklyn, NY) & Brendan MacAllister (Beverly, MA) that highlights wall based and sculptural objects of intense emotion taking shape as fantastical worlds, ubiquitous freaks, and intimate storytelling. Rooted in the fantastical, these works brush up against the threads of truth; resulting in personally intimate tales that may be more real than our contemporary world.

The title for this show is a stitched together from the writings of a Shakespearean play, The History of Richard III, where Richard—a disdainful self-loathing cynic— is above all else a fabricator, a teller of untruths, a man who’s self-indulgent infirmities places him at odds with his nature and his mind. He is a despot that sets up ploys with the aims to attain the crown for himself. We see his tales of murder, espionage, uncouth romances, and power plays clenched firmly under the purview of Richard's totalitarian fantasy. For the story or Richard the III, the fantastic aspects of his persuasions are not the false representations of reality that we tend to associate with storytelling. In fact, for Richard’s fantastical exploits—and in turn the work found in this exhibition— we are seeing the tale of truths. Either taking form in Richard's case as a bid for royalty or in the case for this exhibition as an attempt to foreground morality and reality. 

But the work in Crudely Stamp’d & Half Made Up does not lie nor does it speak of ultimate knowledge. It rests on the backs of two artists whose work aligns in capturing the unseeable, the unknowable and the fantastical as the facetious markers of their imagination. They seek to capture what is omnipresent beyond perceptions, not always offering answers but simply planting questions to prompt a quest in hopes to alleviate internal woes. You undoubtedly will ask are the artists looking to represent a fictitious world or true journalistic events? Who’s the author of these stories? MacAllister? Kim? the Audience? Or something else, a more subtle and unconscious entity? 

Furthermore, it may begin to seem dubious to seek truth in fantasy as many minds tend to believe in fantasy as a future of unimagined scientific innovation; or of a past of a bygone era, where magic reigns over law and land. While it is true that fantasy can elicit thoughts of future far fetched utopian refuges and dystopian dynasties or the distant past worlds full of wonder, tales, quests and mystical factions. These are merely the stages of which fantastical worlds play out. Their realms are often heavily stamp’d by the mark of contemporary discourse. Each character is a reference to a niche—though many times overt—aspects of society that may ultimately go unseen in their story. This tiptoe of truth and imagination found in fantasy results in conversations that are as rich as what could be given from drinking out of the Holy Grail.

As Francisca Pérez-Carreño notes, speaking to the tangible real life and elusive experience of art in, “Fiction as Representation. Or the Verbal Icon Revisited.”, she brings up an illuminating position of “seeing-in” which is, “ a unique [twofold] experience with the recognitional and the configural.” Here she is referencing one's understanding as rooted in both the representation of what we see and the configurations that we, as viewers, bring into our experience of the work. Pérez-Carreño continues to say, “I would say that in a sense the work is transparent and opaque. Transparent because the world of the work is such as it is present, there is nothing to discover behind the representation. Opaque because the representation is always from a particular point of view…” Fantasy can only flourish because of how concrete, direct, and organized these stories often are because of their influence from the real world. In turn, the viewer can “see-into” (seeing-in) bringing in fresh conversations and personal interpretations. 

Brendan MacAllister (Beverly, MA) based out of Boston’s North Shore, utilizes a cyclical approach of world-building in this body of work. By painting, drawing, scanning, printing, and then back again to the pen, ink and paint; MacAllister is drawing directly—sourcing—from the milieu of his own artistic practice. He is the source that is in conversation with the everyday, earnestly creating figures, forms, and marks. MacAllister relies on a feedback loop of images that he creates fed through his bio-machine processor—the brain— allowing the generative tool of the hand to distort, erase, complicate and fantasize his message. MacAllister is churning out, not the AI-slop of every technocratic bros mechanical fantasy, but the essential thing which makes us human, our ability to imagine. MacAllister's world-building process is a rendering of time and the passing of it; as he layers pieces seemingly to say that we were the AI machines all along. Including quips, scribbled moments, color fields, all of which hold the memory deeply entwined with life. These are raw compositions, skewered with personal anecdotes and contemporary societal plights; they are esoteric, they are visions, they are a reality built in the fantasy aesthetic. What follows through each piece is a level of absurdism that oscillates between opaque and in the forefront or transparent and more subtle. Seeing-into these moments of transparency and opaqueness through repetition allows MacAllister to show the absurdity of language, imagery and message. In one work, a deep-purple head gazing at the viewer is all too reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s, The Scream and in both compositions they address the absurd and inherent anxiety of the human condition. MacAllister’s work claims our creativity and ability to reimagine and recontextualize is what makes us human; it is a reclamation from the overreliance on the technological fantasy of the present. 

Isaac Kim (Brooklyn, NY) roots his practice in the intersection of the unseen massive distribution of influences. To question and to see the unseeable and to touch and alter the untouchable. Kim pulls this line of thinking from what Timothy Morton has coined as the hyper Object. Where the hyper object is a “thing” which is massively distributed in time in relation to humans that drastically alters the world. It might even be causing the end of it. As drastically as this world is changing, as reluctantly we have entered an era of hypocrisy, weakness and lameness, it seems that fantasy and the fantastical visual and literary works can relate to the hyper object. From Morton's assertion, “Hyperobjects have had a significant impact on human social and psychic space…rendering both denialism and apocalyptic environmentalism obsolete. Hyperobjects have ushered in a new human phase of hypocrisy, weakness, and lameness…the gap between phenomenon and thing, which the hyperobject makes disturbingly visible…make this fragility conspicuous. Hyperobjects are changing human art and experience (the aesthetic dimension).” Kim is accessing this impact of the hyperobject by rarely offering up answers. Instead Kim poses questions, searching for meanings and looking to hint towards what is beyond our perceptions. In using Taoist (also referred to as Daoist) thought which relates to the hyperobject in its opposite ideals rooted in harmony, simplicity, and effortlessness. Kim has created what could be considered the talismans of our contemporary fantasy. A fantasy where digital 0’s and 1’s compile together to communicate information, and if the balance of off glitches occur. Combining this with the potential Divinational underpinnings of Taoist symbols, one might become entranced in these works in the search to understand the flux of one's life. These become potential tools to aid in a symbolic search for a future, one where society has instead begun to rely on digital technologies instead of focusing on an internal meditation of self-cultivation and harmony. Kim is ultimately asking what is humanity's driving force? Is it in the ways we communicate—with written language, metaphoric symbolism, or with digital data? Does it lay in what is beyond our perceptions, in spiritualistic thought, or in the hyperobject which is largely unseen but wholefully felt.

Ultimately, it is because of imagination that allows fantasy to be able to speak to a momentous group of people. Fantasy does not speak to or look to distinguish a difference between fiction or nonfiction—it exists as respite allowing for escape and contemplation. It is paramount that fantasy allows us to feel the dichotomy of good and evil, of hope and sorrow. To allow us question the fictional worlds in which these works manifest allows us to recognize the utopian progression and the oppressive dystopian worlds that we encounter. The works by Kim and MacAllister look for a resolve by creating fantastical narratives that result from a desire to escape from an existential reality. 

Fantasy is propped up from a focusing of an untamed energy into a genre that faces dread and atrocities head on. To quote from Waniya Masood in, Fiction as an Escape from Postmodern Existential Dread: How Fantasy Responds to a Disillusioned World, “fictional worlds are a search for a larger purpose within a grand narrative, with an identity that is secure in a universal understanding of truth and goodness… many of these worlds are created in opposition to the postmodern world.” Fantasy is the aid we seek in times of uncertainty to give us the pathway out of the unknowns towards reimagined structures of society. The visual fantastical works found in Crudely Stamp’d & Half Made Up are attempts by Kim and MacAllister to tame that energy and point towards the problems hovering over man. This exhibition looks towards aiding viewers in pausing their voyage alongside Richard the III’s attempt at becoming king; allowing you an opportunity to find purpose in the existential dread afflicting the contemporary zeitgeist.