I’ve been sick, out of town for my solo shows (my Erie Museum of Art show is up through Feb 2027), and then catching up from said illness and travel. As a result, I have done you an unintentional disservice by not writing about Ethan Hartranft’s solo exhibition at Waldo’s earlier. Please move quickly and forgive me, art lovers, especially if you’re fans of John Baldasari, Dungeons and Dragons style fantasy quests, and retro throwbacks. “Infinite Serotonin Starving Fever Dream” closes March 3rd.
Traditional media in this exhibition include block printing, printed origami, and bound books made of vinyl records, but they refence contemporary online culture in critical and neutral ways. Hartranft includes QR codes, for example, with his block prints featuring bold women figures embodying traditionally female archetypes associated with fantasy such as the witch, high priestess, and ice queen. The codes lead us to quest stories that the artist wrote about the subjects of the artworks. The presumably helpful mystical figures depicted are hung facing the main wall, which is entirely covered by a grid of identical contiguous square paper block prints. This arrangement resembles concert poster grids on exterior city walls or Warhol grids. The papers contain floating symbolic motifs resembling emojis (dice, a key, a balloon dog, etc.) ala John Baldasari, except Ethan’s are hand carved, adding a critical scrutiny to the meme-ification of 21st century online life and meaning-making.
One of my favorite aspects of the show is that it is chock full of potentially symbolic clues including the motifs I referenced, VHS tapes of certain films like Cats and Disney’s Pocahontas, and lots of difficult to read texts in various orientations and typefaces printed across origami figures. This inclusion of ambiguous “maybe-clues” makes me think of true Medieval and Renaissance European religious symbology (if you were also an art history major you know exactly what a red carnation means in a mother and child painting), of the potentially meaningful but often inconsequential clues in paranoid fiction such as “The Crying of Lot 49,” or the nonsensical attempts at decoding coincidences that is so often part of contemporary conspiracy theories. This ambiguity nicely supports his artist statement about the confusing nature of modern life leading to as a miasma of online distraction causing sleepless fever dreams. As a solution he suggests engagement in creative practice, and based on his chosen media, hand crafting.
Lastly, I’d like to give Hartranft props for the fantastic title of his bound book piece, the intentionally uncapitalized, “if you can learn to love it you just might like it.” It’s a perfect statement for being an artist today. Now go to Waldo’s! Hurry!
