Titled after Samuel Beckett’s 1957 play of the same name, in which stasis and perpetual repetition defer agency as well as endings, this exhibition, curated by Lee Plested with Pat Lenz, smartly foregrounds and toys with its space’s former function as an abattoir without succumbing to the macabre. This occurs in part because so many of the works included here are not about death at all. Certain pieces, such as Anne Collier’s photograph of three stacks of album covers featuring a cropped view of a closed eye, or Ajit Chauhan’s wistful yet goofy procession of wax casts of his own skinny leg (an homage to Robert Gober), do nod to bodies in parts or pieces. But what emerges more strongly here is a sense of distance from the subject as stretched or collapsed, sometimes accordionlike, sometimes entropic.
For Visible Heavens, 2008, Andrew Dadson appropriated a star chart from an 1850 publication, photocopied the image, then photocopied that image, and so on, more than one hundred times. He shows the work here as a slide projection in which the original image slowly degrades into abstract blackness, only to begin again. Kota Ezawa flattens out key moments in Alain Resnais’s 1961 film Last Year in Marienbad with his signature digital animation, but makes his video 3-D and provides the requisite glasses to return some depth to his rendering. Andy Warhol took his photograph of Maria Shriver as an invited guest at her wedding, but the image retains the distance and disdain of the paparazzi’s gaze. Beckett’s themes of deferral and endless, absurd routine are in evidence here, but they are strategically transgressed, too. “Endgame” is the first project in this space, and one hopes the whiff of subversiveness that attends viewing contemporary art in a former slaughterhouse just down the road from the picturesque offerings of Healdsburg will only grow stronger.
