Peripheral Wham City denizens Ben Furgal and Jimmy Joe Roche offer a revved-up, no-tech show in Glittering Ruin. Furgal's work here are collages-qua-architectural isometric drawings, splitting the difference between 1980s hyper-edited video compilation assault and early video-game fantasyland. In "Ruins," "Cave," "Tower," and "Graveyard," Furgal takes meticulously cut pieces of paper--from day-glow colored poster board to magazine and newspaper photos--and assembles vaguely representational imagery out of them. "Tower" could be just that--some castle with a multistory armament jutting up on the right side of Furgal's all-white paper canvas, hovering dreamlike in this nonspecific background. The impudently two-dimensional form becomes more complicated upon close inspection--the eye tries to break down the geometric cutouts into their originating sources, futilely trying to recognize a photo's repeating pattern or dominant image--but your brain wants to read the assembled forms as some recognizable object.
Roche's works--collages, Polaroids, cut-out paper, video--are even more low-concept, low-tech, and surreptitiously effective. Roche reaps great visual fun out of the most nonidea ideas: His video "Ultimate Reality" takes recognizable Arnold Schwarzenegger clips and makes quasi-psychedelic images with them by reflecting them along a vertical axis. The videos don't go anywhere, but watching them is like being transported into somebody else's hallucinatory playground.
More curious are Roche's mixed-media on paper pieces "Yipes!" and "Doom" and his dazzling cut-paper wall hangings. Both "Yipes!" and "Doom" look like detritus: two cut-paper collages with what looks like crayon scribblings advertising nothing in particular. "Yipes!" admits "I fucking shit myself" in a 5-year-old's scrawl above a blobby morass; the adjacent "Doom" admonishes "2012 we die" in the same childish hand beneath a haphazard collaged-paper "X." Individually the pieces are blatantly stupid; together they exude this creepy, cutesy vibe, kind of like seeing a street-corner kid soberly proselytize the end of days.
With his cut-paper wall hangings, though, such as the monstrous "Greater Dimensional Neo-Spiritual Entity," Roche has some bona fide stunners. Cut-out day-glow paper gets turned into wall-sized totem poles of vaguely esoteric-qua-tribal vision quest forms, looking like something some Pacific Northwest Native American might design for a 1973 mass-market paperback edition of Siddhartha. (That they're more alluring when illuminated with black light makes them even more Greg Brady's attic odd.) Glittering Ruin is defiantly meaningless, but like Warhol in the 1960s, you get the impression Roche and Furgal don't believe everything is nothing, but rather suspect that nothing is something.
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