Citrus

There are fault lines beneath the organic groves of California and asphalt over the San Gabriel’s sea of lemons. Bright before you, against green leaves. Round, with skin that glistens and sends scent out through its pores. Inside the first thick skin, the fruit is formed of sections, fragments, pieces held together by another skin that’s thin, whitish, veiny. Bit or cut into, pulp like stalactites, organs, flower follicles filled with juice that drips down your tongue, chin, hands and is sticky. 

For their exhibition, CITRUS, visual artists Cole Barash and Jack Bool dissolved the parameters around their work. Using images and mixed media pieces from different bodies of work that pull from documentary, abstract, commissioned, portraiture and the natural world, they created a visual dialog carrying their work through the installation itself. In bridging their separate work and the lines between their different modes of image-making together, Bool and Barash also reflect on how they wade through and make sense of the different worlds and images they work with.

Based in Cape Cod, Barash’s work peers through the fault lines between human life and the natural world. His prints — with UV (solar) ink on recycled tenting material, rice paper and burlap, are explorations that connect the photographic process, the moment of seeing, and material relationships. A waterfall, mountains, water ways, a hand letting go of rope in mid-air, bridge his documentary lineage into abstraction, symbols, memory and the eclipse of memory. Barash has a commitment to the return — to specific places, communities, or meditations — to get to know them and to see the lives that make up this country. Landscapes and portraits fuse the forms of land and bodies. Twisting knees and legs, rivers and sands emerge in a mist of living material memory, a simultaneous sense loss and of restoration. They are open inquiries into an understanding of ecosystems that include the human world, himself, and the earth as its own life.

Based in LA, Bool’s work reflects a hyper-realism he experienced growing up, saturated by images, most often on a screen. Backlit, glowing, vibrant. In his work he explores the fascination of image culture, of surface and facade — "the facade of a suburban home, a spray tan, the romance of plastic and lots of billboards.” There is desire he sees for the hyper-real, an American aspiration, epitomized in commercial pictures. He sees that aspiration also internalized in the gaze of the subject looking back at the camera — an inevitable projection of image. Something real and not real at the same time — which could also describe photography. In his studies of Boyhood, as in the Weimei series, though we see skin, almost touching, so alike, in almost sublime states, a fantastical idea of masculine closeness. Boys embrace in intimate gestures, huddled close together on the edge of a cliff, lifting one another upwards towards a rooftop, tailgating in a parking lot. 

A tension in escape leaves open a tenderness seeps through the surfaces throughout the show: a silky peach cloth strewn like an intimate over a silver Chevrolet, netted sacks bursting with onions tied off with a pink plastic bow, the skin of the boys in Weimeia almost touching, a bare arm laid down by a pocket of stones, the rippling desert sands, a waterfall bursting bright yellow out of a tent.

For the final piece, Bool and Barash made small scrapbooks from the contact sheets they had spread over the table - one threw a picture in and the other answered back. The poet Rilke talked about “touch space.” The yearning through his work to touch the world and be touched. These scrapbooks, containing images from across their work and lives, hold close to that chord which moves throughout the forty-plus pieces in this show.