Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Shelley Carr reviews YOGAFLOGOGO at Southern Exposure in San Francisco, California. 

Sylvie Nelson as The Outer Limit of Your Body, YOGAFLOGOGO; live performance at Southern Exposure, February 21, 2015. Courtesy of the Artist and Southern Exposure. Photo: Matt Shapiro.

Neon colored tape, fanny packs and leotards, animated speaking hairballs, and videos of aerobic booty shaking—there was a lot going on at Southern Exposure on Saturday, February 21. In YOGAFLOGOGO, a performance organized by artist Olivia Mole, a trio of actors carried out a series of actions in an attempt to perform the synergy between the loss of individuality as young women nearing adulthood and an absurdist take on the dumbing-down of pop consumer culture.

The latest iteration by Mole—part of three two-week process-based performance and video projects—is set in a cartoonish space divided by plastic barriers, large stones, a TV set, and a yellow couch. Three projections positioned high on the walls offer humorous asides and a clunky, animated endoscopy set to lurid sound effects.

Mole’s cast consisted of three high-school-age female characters: The Outer Limit Of Your Body (Sylvia Nelson), Future Teen Cave Witch Polly Ethylene (Sadie Alan), and Future Teen Cave Witch Polly Propylene (Antonia Duble). While Nelson’s character acts as a sort of omnipotent fairy on the periphery, the Future Teen Cave Witch girls—named after two types of plastic—fulfill the oversimplified image of teens lacking personality. Complete with deliberately artificial movements and actions, they are blindly mesmerized by the screen, and their movements are dictated by the TV sequences. The intentional plasticity of movements and actions speaks to the problematic infusion of consumer culture into everyday life.

Like a DIY goddess, The Outer Limit attempts to communicate with the mindless consumer-culture girls through a totem fashioned from exercise equipment, golden garland, and tape, while she read from an iPhone. (The totem is a reference to the omphalos in Greek mythology, a stone that gave the oracle at Delphi her powers of insight.) She strains to awaken the minds of the thoughtless teenagers with references to Greek mythology, poetry, theoretical writings by Georges Bataille and Luce Irigaray, as well as other mystery phrases and seemingly nonsensical fragments, but her attempts to reach the girls are in vain. The girls recite a line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest as if it were a technical user’s manual. When the TV turns to static, it “kills” the girls, as if the death of their guiding mechanism means their death as well.

Each moment of the elaborate performance structure was kaleidoscopic and unpredictable, but the continual flashes of humor kept it lighthearted and entertaining, even if it was confusing at times. YOGAFLOGOGO endeavored to create an experience that combined a multitude of referential quotes and ideas into a problematic relationship between emotional growth and consumer culture, but the sheer volume of references was lost within the “tempest” of the performance itself.

YOGAFLOGOGO was a live performance at Southern Exposure in San Francisco on February 21, 2015. 

Shelley Carr is an artist, writer, and curator working toward an MA Curatorial Practice at California College of the Arts.