This and That--Remember 9-11 at The MAC, Masami Teraoka with Lynda Hess, Adam Teraoka and Young Jo An Teraoka It's a family affair at The MAC. "This and That" is a showing of paintings by Masami Teraoka and his partner Lynda Hess and the sculptural objects of his son, Adam Teraoka, and his wife, Young Jo An Teraoka. Can anyone say nepotism? The more appropriate word here, however, is kitsch. While one might disparage this display of family-produced whatnot for its overt sense of opportunism ("Hey, honey, get the kids and load the car. We've got a show in Dallas!"), parts of the show are worth seeing just for the sheer bombast. And that's why the word "kitsch"--the German word for "trash" used in common parlance to mean tastefully bad-taste art--is so appropriate here. Whether intentional or not, Teraoka pere is a master of kitsch. Located in the main gallery of The MAC, Teraoka's large-scale narrative paintings are worth the rubber-necking. The pregnant women, priests and bishops wearing thongs and beat-me boots are more than enough to make you ponder the irrational fears of a new post-September 11 world. Burqa-sheathed and dynamite-dripping figurines dance across neo-Byzantine picture planes telling tales of a new global order. Teraoka is especially fond of quoting (one hopes that he is satirizing) past forms of high Church painting, rendering narrative detail in large-scale oil paintings and triptychs both mid-size and grand. Flanking the main entrance into the central gallery are two mid-sized triptychs, "Semana Santa/Cloisters Workout" (2004) depicting fire and brimstone at the gym, and "Venus' Serpentine Confession" (2003), a visual tale of confession in the park, replete with a breast-implanted priest chasing a dominatrix. On the facing wall is an enormous triptych, "Semana Santa/Venus' Security Check" (2004), a parable of suicide bombing at the airport and sexually abusive priests all set within a Venus-on-the-half-shell window box à la Botticelli. The paintings run the risk of stoking further the fires of the anti-Enlightenment Second-Coming-ism that is so central to George W.'s campaign. At the same time, however, they also point the finger of blame at all religious fanatics. Ultimately, Teraoka is an equal opportunist when it comes to criticizing religion. Far different from the high-pitched if not cloying emotionalism of this work is the Duchamp-inspired sculptural pieces of Teraoka fils, located just outside the main gallery. Adam Teraoka stitches and welds together various found objects as a mode of mechanical invention. In the mixed media piece "New Los Angeles Apartment" (2004), the younger Teraoka has made a minimalist nomadic dwelling from a grocery cart--and a provocative statement on being homeless in L.A. Along the wall adjacent to these sculptural found-object pieces is the work of his wife, Young Jo An Teraoka, a row of small wooden blocks adorned with lacquered candy hung in a horizontal row on the wall titled "Candy Collection Summer 2004." Just beyond this, located in the New Works Space, are the figural and surreal paintings of Lynda Hess, Teraoka pere's significant other. Hess' paintings bring to mind carnival and movie posters, a visual vehicle that long ago used expressive and even bawdy realist imagery as a means to sell tickets. While Hess' claim is universal, to "explore the link between our physical bodies and our unconscious," her focus is highly gender-specific, with most of the paintings focusing on the pressures of being a woman--the drive for physical and mental perfection--in the current world. If time is money, then the current show at The MAC offers a lot of bang for the buck. Through October 17 at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave., 214-953-1212. (Charissa N. Terranova)
