Alternate Histories now on display at the LCAD Gallery
By MARRIE STONE
Photos by Jeff Rovner
If you’re struggling to make sense of this tumultuous historical moment, you’re not alone. Social systems, having been in slow decline for decades, seem to be crumbling all at once. Suddenly, there are few topics upon which we can all agree, except that we’re collectively suffering from cognitive dissonance.
That experience is sometimes difficult to articulate. Leave it to artists to give visual language to our conflicted thoughts. Particularly artists whose work arises out of academia. Artists who are in touch with political science, philosophy, sociology, psychology and all the disciplines that attempt to apply reason to make sense of things. But who also understand the subconscious mind and the intuitive work that art requires. Enter Perin Mahler, Carl Dobsky and Benjamin Duke – three academics and artists whose work is currently on display at the LCAD Gallery through January 19.
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(L-R) Carl Dobsky, Perin Mahler and Benjamin Duke whose work is now on display at the LCAD Gallery through January 19, 2025
Alternate Histories includes 10 pieces of work, all produced since 2020. The narratives they portray might well feel more emotionally resonant than reality itself. Each piece contains psychological truths embedded in fantastical scenes, making them wholly hypothetical while also frighteningly possible.
“I became interested in humanist ideas around painting which came out of the Renaissance, but really date back to the ancient world,” Dobsky said. “Painting and poetry were considered sister arts. That left a deep impression on me to think of pictures as dramas and approach painting the way poets would compose a poem or writers would construct a novel. I wanted action to carry (the viewer) through the story as the narrative unfolds.”
No surprise that Dobsky’s Taken By Storm (A Return to the State of Nature) is full of plots and subplots, themes and subthemes, narrative action and resolution, symbolism and metaphor. Influenced by political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dobsky had Hobbes’ state of nature in mind when he produced this dystopian grocery store scene. He completed the painting right before January 6, 2021, and was blown away by its sudden relevance.
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Carl Dobsky poses with “Taken By Storm (A Return to the State of Nature)”
“I was thinking more about a natural disaster – like a hurricane – and how we descend into a kind of tribalism,” Dobsky said. “I don’t really believe in the state of nature, at least not how Hobbes proposed it. Even Hobbes presented it as a fiction (which ties into the title of the show).”
Nonetheless, the painting bore more than a little emotional resemblance to reality that day. “The two main characters – the one getting his shirt ripped off and the guy with the bald head – both have tribal tattoos. Some people have this every-man-for-himself mentality. But in any disaster, people also ask for help. So, in the foreground, there’s a security guard that’s fallen and a woman has come to help. That breaks the cycle.”
Ironically, though the security guard and her aide are front and center in the foreground, Dobsky said few people focus on that part of the narrative, often missing it entirely.
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Though in the foreground, few viewers seem to notice the helper that comes to the security guard’s aid. That, itself, might reveal a psychological truth about human nature.
In curating the show, Mahler focused on each artist’s interpretation of the traditional history painting. “All three of us have some foot in classicism and the traditions of art history,” he said. “We’re interested in anatomical accuracy and using the figure in larger formats, which allows us to explore larger themes.”
For Mahler, who uses symbolism in more overt ways (like a jumble of letters that bury his characters alive or brightly wrapped gift boxes that ultimately contain only disappointment), responding to our contemporary cultural moment is the point. He often allows his intuition to guide the process. “I get my ideas in a kind of hypnagogic state, either in the middle of the night or when I’m waking up,” he said. “My brain is a little less linear. That’s when the visual ideas can integrate with the narrative ideas.”
Conversation (2020) represents the first time Mahler started fracturing space in his paintings. “I was trying to predict a wandering mind in conversation,” he said.
The many protests, from #metoo to BLM to Antifa, made him feel society was beginning to exist in parallel universes. “When we’re confronted with limitless amounts of information, we have to pare down the data and select what’s pertinent. But that forces us to leave out a lot of information so we can construct a coherent worldview. That’s why I became interested in fracturing these spaces (in my paintings) so they aren’t coherent anymore.”
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Perin Mahler poses with his 2020 piece, “Conversation”
Mahler’s longstanding obsession with materialism and consumerism also makes an appearance. “The Amazon box has this magical power that casts a spell over us. It can feel like Christmas when we receive laundry detergent on our front door. When we’re absorbed in that experience, we’re not even conscious of its carbon footprint or the inequities and labor involved.”
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Perin Mahler’s “Possessed” (2021)
The show’s third artist, Benjamin Duke, also contributed a piece entitled The Conversation (2022), a painting that – coincidentally – also fractures space in even more overt ways. A scene from a French cafe exists alongside a graffiti-filled street incorporating some collage from National Geographic magazine. A young girl clings precariously to the building a few stories up as her mother watches from the window, showing the anxiety of parenthood. Duke’s work, too, is full of themes and subthemes and complex narratives.
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Benjamin Duke with his piece “The Conversation” (2022)
Some pieces are entirely metaphorical. Mahler’s Dreamer (2024) showcases a man crushed by letters that have no meaning. It feels like language has failed us, breaking down so completely that we’re crushed under our inability to communicate. But in Mahler’s fractured space, nature seems to not only survive, but thrive.
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Perin Mahler’s “Dreamer” (2024)
“I’m hesitant to tie my work to something topical,” Dobsky said. “That would make it a commentary on a specific event. It wouldn’t allow for reflections on how certain occurrences happen not only in our own times, but other times as well. That takes a lot of the emotion out of it.
“It’s a real trick to make art that applies to multiple times and places without losing the weight of particularity. If you make an image that functions only as a symbol – like Lady Justice holding a set of scales and a sword – it no longer works the way a great story does.”
But depicting a great story that’s become a symbol – like the famous parable of the blind man and the lame man – can still communicate universally specific truths about human nature.
“It’s a story that pops up in various cultures and throughout various times,” Dobkin said. “I don’t want to make an illustration of it exactly, but I wanted to portray something we all struggle with – whether within ourselves or within society. We’re all trying to get rid of something we’re completely dependent upon. I’m angry at my fellow citizens for lots of things, but I can’t just get rid of them all. If democracy was only my way, it would no longer be democracy. I’m looking for an image that speaks to that conflict.”
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Carl Dobkin poses with “The Argument of the Blind Man and the Lame Man”
Equally compelling are the internal conflicts we all experience, which Duke has an uncanny ability to portray. In his 2022 painting e, Duke turns what could be a tranquil moment enjoying tea into a crisis of disassociation.
“I was describing the kind of pictorial fracturing of time and place,” he said. “The singular figure experiencing a sense of vertigo perhaps, or the room itself is breaking apart through a kind of nostalgic memory. You know that feeling – sometimes you’re just sitting there and the world kind of begins to crumble.”
Reminiscent of Mahler’s pile of letters, Duke also uses a giant “e” as a sort of displacement. Is language, or code, replacing us while the world is making itself into something new?
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Benjamin Duke poses with “e”
Duke also likes to play with time in his pieces, showing every stage of a painting, from sketch to drawing to painting, collapsed together at once. In Daydreams in Transit, he repeats the same image of his mother-in-law and wife. “I was borrowing from something like The Matrix – the idea that if you’re experiencing déjà vu then something has changed in the matrix. But, also, the kind of thought worlds we live in. Even though we live with our parents, we don’t know really what their world is made of. It’s a subjective kind of frame. Also, at the time, I was happy making one of the thought (bubbles) a brick wall.”
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Benjamin Duke’s “Daydreams in Transit”
It’s satisfying to see our modern world married to the past. Linking contemporary culture to ancient stories and dead philosophers provides strange comfort. It tells us that humans are built to endure, no matter the strife of the moment. Invoking alternate realities, worlds familiar enough to be adjacent to our own, scratches a strange existential itch.
There’s a word in John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – ringlorn. He defines it as “the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales – a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory, a mythic bond with an ancient past, or a battle for survival against a clear enemy, rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.”
Perhaps that’s what these three men have given us. A fulfillment of that wish. A way to see this moment in history as something grand and epic, a common battle we’re fighting together at a time when we often feel so very alone.
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“Alternate Histories” is on display at the LCAD Gallery through January 19, 2025, located at 374 Ocean Ave. Entry is always free. For hours and other information, visit their website by clicking here.
