The Anxious Object
Thoughts on the ‘Listen to the Gradient’ Exhibition
at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation
WRITTEN BY TOM PAZDERKA | PHOTOS BY MIKAEL JORGENSENCassandra C. Jones Magical Realism, 2024 House of 300 Affirmation Cards (60 unique cards repeated 5 times each)
I don’t know about the reader specifically, but a strange, uneasy feeling about the state of the current human condition has beset me. To borrow a term from Adam Curtis, things appear to be “hypernormal,” which describes a simplified, narrative-driven reality that replaces what is truly happening. Curtis himself borrowed the term for his documentary Hypernormalisation. In it, he draws parallels between what the term signifies, the final days of the Soviet Union before the collapse, and capitalism. To those who know me, this idea isn’t very new or fresh, but in my mind, it bears repeating. Whatever is repeated becomes truth in a kind of magical, ritualistic fashion. How any of this is related to an art exhibition in a small mountain resort town will hopefully soon become evident.
The first thing one sees when walking into the gallery space of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation is a House of Cards built into several A-frame constructions. On closer inspection, each card has on it a blurred-out image of balloons with an affirmation printed over the top. “Impulse shopping on Amazon is in my past,” “I rise above manufactured political polarization,” “I see through media sensationalism,” “I have plenty of time,” “I overcome confirmation bias,” “I have patience with those I do not understand,” and so on. Immediately, one gets the sense that something isn’t quite right. This is what the artist Cassandra C. Jones writes in a statement about the piece called Magical Realism.
“This piece is my attempt to cope with the election results of 2024. Through my disappointment, I had difficulty accepting my authentic self, which was experiencing doom and gloom while simultaneously wanting to be a manifester and focus on positive possibilities. I grew up in a self-help home, and manifesting was a lifestyle my family subscribed to in a big way. It is how my mother, in particular, coped with life by shutting out anything negative and only speaking positive things into being. As a result, I grew up with a lot of repressed feelings and experienced overwhelming guilt for having any negative thoughts.”
I’m not sure when affirmations became an industry standard, but they’ve been a baked-in component of the social media and business/self-improvement guru sphere for a long time. Even before I read the artist’s statement about the meaning of the cards, I felt a much deeper sense of a desire to heal, but not just from the results of the election itself, but from a pervasive existential anxiety, some of which can be linked to the causes that produced Trump as a symptom in the first place. The statement felt a little bit like a ruse to get me to think in a particular way about a particular problem. The artist continues:
“After years of therapy, I developed a healthy balance between positive and negative reasoning, my strengths and weaknesses, and the ups and downs of life. Still, the election threw me way off, and I had difficulty finding my flow between polarities. So, I wrote down everything I wished would happen in these modern times as affirmations. As you read them, you can assume that the opposite is currently true.
Magical Realism (or Jones’ House of Cards) identifies a long-standing problem facing people who are followers of the self-improvement ethos. They often unintentionally cause greater problems elsewhere in their desire to do good. And the political arena is the place where the most damage can be done and seen.
And therein lies the problem. The progressives campaign for affordable housing and lower prices but know that for that to happen, their own assets would have to go down in price and their living standard decrease, which is, of course, unacceptable. The knock-on effects through our economy cannot be overstated. The progressives may want to act prosocially and publicly declare their allegiance to public causes. Still, underneath, they act first and foremost as individuals whose desires are at odds with the public they intend to serve. The result is a tension, a House of Cards scenario, that in a city like Ojai can lead to an almost psychic break with reality. People voted for Trump for the second time not just out of spite and resentment, but because they believed that he could do something about the massive government debt. Spoiler alert: he won’t.
Here is a different example. The United States and the West are in an insane amount of debt, and this debt, owned by the asset holder class, the banks, and the financial institutions, is the reason for the massive wealth gap between the rich and everyone else. In a world where everything is financialized, including elections (2024 was the first year one could bet on who would become president), our governments are essentially borrowing against future generations to pay these debts and making the banks, the institution, and the oligarchy more and more powerful every day.
Whatever we’re ‘progressing’ toward isn’t always something positive, and the existential meaning of the word itself is slowly circling the drain of the political skibidi toilet. What I feel the affirmations represent is a yearning of the progressive consciousness to reestablish a personal contact with a sense of purpose and identity, because it had been in a crisis state for many years. In the absence of a purpose the right wing is perfectly capable of attracting people lost while searching for it. It has the right tools at its disposal, the style to entice, and the language to describe problems that the progressive left is unwilling to see. The Bernie Sanders campaign was the last gasp of the leftist attempt to offer ordinary people a sense of existential purpose, metaphysical certainty, and a relationship with the absolute, something beyond itself and simple individualism.
Moving through the room amongst Joel Fox’s miniature 3D printed figures installed at various heights and weird locations, one gets to Shana Moulton’s site-specific installation. Like Jones’ House of Cards, Moulton’s installation satirizes the self-care industry. I’ve never really been a huge fan of video art, but I do appreciate and understand its cultural import. There is a small but interesting tradition in conceptually driven video art that uses tongue-in-cheek references to mock itself or the culture from which it arises. Among these is Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen from 1975, a feminist reinterpretation of domesticity and gender roles.
In Moulton’s Galactic Pot Healer, with a single channel video as its center point, the installation is stylized as a small healing room, filled with absurd, funny, and nonsensical items made out of pill boxes, medicine balls, a surgical practice dummy, a neti pot, and gemstones, clearly meant to spoof the healing arts and beauty industry. The bathroom sign converted into an artwork by the artist is especially clever in this regard. Moulton is a bit more sincere than funny in the video, which follows Cynthia, Moulton’s alter-ego, on a quest to find a ‘Galactic Pot Healer’ after she breaks one of her favorite pots. Though the Healer can’t fix the pot and offers Cynthia a massage instead, while on the table, the Healer creates a pot out of Cynthia’s back that the Healer then ‘bakes’ in a microwave “thus revealing that the power to heal was in her all along.”
Shana Moulton, Neti Pot, green wire, and plastic nose.
Shana Moulton, A ceramic hand with a band-aid, two medical balls, and a pill box with special shells and stones inside.
Bathroom sign, green wall vinyl, and a red pill box filled with small shells and special stones. CGBF's bathroom has two entrances. Because Shana's installation blocked one of the doors, Shana transformed the bathroom sign and made it part of her installation.
Shana Moulton, Viewers can view Galactic Pot Healer from the plushy, velour, wavy chair featured in many of her videos.
My read of the installation is slightly more pessimistic and if the reader is curious, I am writing this with a full view of my own ‘Miracle Ball’ on the floor. What I am interested in and respond to, perhaps not intended by the artist, are the colors of these objects and what they might represent. The 21st century is marked by a steady flow and movement from one crisis to the next. Crisis seems to be a defining characteristic of our age. It is interesting that with increased anxiety as a direct result of this crisis dynamic, there exists now an increased ‘demand’ (desire) for color; the more saturated, the better, as if this is an attempt to exorcise the spiritual and psychic grayness lurking within us. The objects we consume, the clothes we wear, and the spaces we inhabit are meant to reflect us at our best. This, of course, produces a tension between who we are and who we perceive ourselves to be. Industry also produces similar tensions between what it demands — consumers, workers, ambitious entrepreneurs, and so on — and what it sells — efficiency, comfort, leisure, etc. At no time in the past (that we know of, though we often speculate otherwise) have humans lived as well or as comfortably as today. At no point in the past have humans enjoyed as much wealth, leisure, travel time, or the finer things in life. And yet the atmosphere is one of existential despair, driven by unbridled ambition and desire to be ‘our best selves.’
What is also strange is that with increased comfort and leisure, the human body reacts negatively by becoming restless and anxious, seeking imbalance. As we become accustomed to all the best things in life, we also become aware that none offer comfort or consolation to our souls. It is fairly ironic that the objects we buy and consume, those objects that designers pore over for countless hours, fretting over style, form, and color, are often meant to offer relief from the anxiety that those same objects, or the desire for them, cause in the first place. Like the affirmation cards whose actual or ‘hidden’ meaning is the opposite of what is written on them, the modern world appears to us as fun and playful, comforting and convenient. Still, it is, in reality, complex and confusing.
To paraphrase the Czech anarchist author Jaroslav Hasek, human existence is so immense and complex that the life of an individual is by comparison, almost meaningless. In that kind of world, only humor can uncover the seriousness of our predicament.
Joel Fox, Scene 3, 2025 Four 3D printed self-portraits, shelf
Joel Fox, Scene 4 2025 Self-portrait 3D print, holographic sticker, shelf
Joel Fox, Scene 6, 2025 Leaves, self-portrait 3D print, shelf
Joel Fox Co-produced by Jennifer Jordan Day Bryce Vision, 2023 Archival Giclée Print
Now, my hypernormal reading of the exhibition is presumably not what the artists Cassandra C. Jones, Shana Moulton, and Joel Fox had in mind. I’m aware that my own pessimism about the human condition is here a specific filter through which I have analyzed the artworks on display, perhaps with the exception of Joel’s figures. To be sure, I love Joel’s whimsical figurines and his deadpan literalist humor — small scenes of figures of Joel ordered from small to large or morphing from “normal to a flat version of himself” and another with ‘gradients’ of leaves behind him. There is also something sweet about Joel’s idea of collecting Afghan rugs for the purpose of harnessing the energy of their makers, usually an elderly woman, a mother, or a grandmother, to make himself feel like a wizard. That approach to art is hard for me to ascribe any kind of pessimistic reading to, so I won’t even try. You win this time, Joel!
Actually, all three artists win. They’ve made me slightly less pessimistic about the future, and they’ve done it using art.
POST CARD FRONT, Joel and Cassandra figured people like to look at their phones. So they made them a phone so they would look at this instead. It worked. People even held it like a phone when THEYgave it to them and kept it in their hands that way. Lol.
Post Card BACK
'Listen to the Gradient' is curated by Cassandra C. Jones and is on view at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation in Ojai until January 25, 2025. The CGBF hours are Thur-Sun 1-5 pm, and there will be a morning closing on the 25th with Pinholita Coffee Van and BAKE.
