To get into Bitches Talkin, the collaborative exhibition at Black Ball Projects by Eileen Quinlan and Tamar Halper (ET, collectively), you have to call Joe, who’s glad to answer any questions you have, he’ll just be behind the wall over there. It seems fitting that one has to contend with this strange combination of absence and presence just to enter the building, given its pervasiveness throughout the show itself. It’s no accident that the image of Ms. Havisham, a woman for whom Compeyson’s absence became a presence, features prominently in several of the artwork.
Despite Halper and Quinlan describing the exhibition as “a shared experience, an exchange, a conversation . . . me, myself, and I become us, ours. Disintegration of self,” their respective selves are indeed quite integrated into the show. While most of the works are credited to “ET,” their two-humped collaborative camel, there are three pieces authored individually: two by Quinlan, one by Halper.
You can trace each artist’s contributions to their collaborative works through the “fingerprints” they seem to have left behind. The arrangement of several of the pieces—perpendicular to the wall, allowing you to view it from either side—seems to facilitate this effort to assign credit individually, to split their partnership after the fact.
At first, it seemed to me that Quinlan held the dominant role in the collaboration—the motif of a sine-wave deep-blue textured duvet in “Laura” is visible in the majority of ET’s pieces. But as I stepped past (not through; this author does not have an extra $30,000 just lying around) the gauzy curtains of “My Blood Flows Satanic,” Quinlan’s individuality began to fade from the art, and likewise how I saw it.
Many of the pieces on display at Bitches Talkin are very similar—to the point where I had trouble differentiating them in the program I had in hand—but more than repetitive, the artwork is iterative. As you walk through the exhibition, the markers of individuality fade as they are refracted through each artist’s eyes, until the work becomes so like them both that it is at the same time like neither.
I think it’s no accident that the piece “Red Dead” stands out most at the show. Its color palette is much more vibrant than the muted blues and greens of its surrounding work, and it bears almost no resemblance to the others in terms of subject, representation, even medium. Its shapes are almost hallucinogenic, shouting at you as you leave that, just like Ms. Havisham, just like “artistic identity,” it’s time for the ego to die. “Especially because of these difficult global times.”
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