E.K. Huckaby at Solomon Projects Art in America February 2002, p. 132-133

With his ironic, intelligent brand of conceptual art, E.K. Huckaby has established a corner on postmodernist Southern gothic, as was evident in his most recent exhibition of found-object art works. Aporia, for example, is a full-scale replica of an old-fashioned postal cubicle faced with a metal grille. The interior walls of this tiny space are covered with vibrant postage stamps from around the world, all of which picture other stamps. Stacked neatly on the counter, as if awaiting pickup, is a pile of envelops sent through the mail to Huckaby, each one bearing a colorful Norman Rockwell commemorative. The cheerfully nostalgic scene is disrupted by a specimen jar, also on the counter, containing a human tongue suspended in formaldehyde. A look through the side windows reveals that the wall that a clerk would face is also plastered with stamps-- these depicting all manner of weaponry, from handguns to AK-47s.

The exhibition, "Department of Dysiatrics," (a huckaby-coined word that refers to the treatment of mistakes), contained other equally macabre works, including No Aftertaste, a rack of old poison bottles framed by an antique arched window. Some pieces are more comic in their straightforwardness, such as Tooth Fairy, a miniature assemblage featuring an elf surrounded by great stacks of human teeth and coins. The literal-minded Aphasia is a wall sculpture in which strings of tiny beads bearing individual letters have been arranged to form nonsense words.

Each of the 20 sculptures and objectlike paintings in this show comment on loss, disorganization or a fatal confusion of categories. One of the most beautiful and bewildering is Scriptio Effrenus, a mock natural history diorama of stuffed birds whose beaks have been replaced by metal nibs from fountain pens. The discomfort elicited by these writing birds is exceeded only by that of another work-- set into the wall and viewable only through a small peephole-- in which live snails with erotic saying written on their shells crawl around a dingy miniature bathroom. This conscious nod to Marcel Duchamp's Etant donnes sums up Huckaby's wry approach to the human condition, drawing parallels to other species in ways that are bitterly analytical yet rendered almost compassionate through the sheer bizarrerie of his humor.

"Dept. of Dysiatrics" installation views paintings   |   sculpture   |   bio