Gary Sweeney can feel like a stand-up comic masquerading as an artist. His exhibition at Red Arrow Contemporary offers a satisfying survey of his brand of visual and linguistic punchlines. In his pieces, pithy phrases interrupt random images pulled from advertising, carved into wood, or appropriated from historical sources. At times the pieces seem like they are just being clever or absurd, like the 1950s photo of a car crossing the continental divide in Colorado with Sweeney’s intruding caption “Colorado: The state that keeps Nebraska from running into Utah.” Sometimes they’re funny in a way that feels more layered. Sweeney’s ingenious public art proposal for the San Antonio River uses a fake historical marker like the one you find at Civil War sites to conjure an insane story – incorporating aspects of nearly every famous Navel battle — about a fictional battle on little Texas river. It is laugh-out-loud funny, but it also seems to be picking at a hermeneutic scab – questioning the way we represent, convey, and interpret real history.
Sweeney’s work is most poignant when its humor sojourns into the macabre. A photo series of John Doe cadavers from around the world; a pithy observation about the pet tastes of psychopaths; a hotel room cluttered with neon signs surrounding a man on bed, with a caption telling us the words are taken from a note written by a young immigrant man who was found dead in the Texas desert: these works aren’t so much looking for belly laughs, but their meaning is contingent on the artist’s characteristic, if occasionally bleak, ironic twist. In this way, Sweeney’s humor does the work all great stand-ups achieve in their comedy, using the laughs to let our guard down, and letting something real and uncomfortable about the world slip past our defenses.
