Subversive Complicity

The artists in Subversive Complicity borrow from the aesthetics and methodologies of disciplines outside the fine arts (e.g., engineering, political activism, architecture/urban planning, etc.) to create hybrid visual and theoretical languages. While much of the work in Subversive Complicity entails documentation of the process through which the piece was made or of the life cycle of the piece itself, the most interesting pieces probe the intersection of process, product, and community. Following the curators' interdisciplinary query, the exhibition itself resembles a trade show where the individual artists have displays to show their products, documentation, and to allow for some degree of interaction.

Sherri Lynn Wood, The Mantra Trailer, 2006.

Sherri Lynn Wood's Mantra Trailer probes the intersections of the personal, public, theological, political, and art. Having received both a MFA in sculpture and a Masters in Theology Studies, Wood is equipped with an unusual skill and knowledge set that informs her work in surprising and refreshing ways. At The Lab, Wood presents documentation of the Mantra Trailer, both aural and photographic, and invites her viewers to write out mantras. Otherwise the Mantra Trailer is a roving 1972 breadbox trailer that allows participants to enter and record a mantra. The mantras are then played over a loud speaker or appear as ever changing plastic marquis letters on the side of the trailer. While Wood uses Mantra Trailer to explore the idea of a Mantra (etymologically meaning Mind Tool), some of her participants use it as a confessional booth, genie lamp, or open mic for poetic musings and comic relief. While Wood's Mantra Trailer borrows from the roadside evangelism and folksy aesthetics attributed to the Bible Belt, it is pliable enough to allow for regionalist interpretations as it travels throughout the US. By not pining Mantra Trailer down to any organized religion, Wood's piece also may act as critique/endorsement of new age religious/spiritual experimentation so popularized and commercialized on the West Coast. Wood views her Mantra Trailer as a tool through which her participants may voice their own opinions in the media soaked landscape of jingles, slogans, and propaganda. In addition to the political and public aspects of this piece, Mantra Trailer addresses the personal on multiple fronts. On a literal level the viewer is invited to express, declare, or reveal their own mantra. Metaphorically the trailer be seen as a representation of interiority and the body. On Wood's website www.MantraTrailer.com she writes:

The Mantra Trailer deals with the terrain of landscape, globalization and isolation through the scale of the body. The physical trailer mirrors the body's process of manifestation. It has an interior space for contemplation and authorship and an exterior site of broadcast, presentation, and dialogue. As voice and language pass through the operation of the trailer, the private monologue surprisingly reveals itself as social discourse.

To follow Wood's analogy, the trailer, like the individual is mobile and subject to theological and existential transformations through time. While Mantra Trailer may lack aesthetic appeal, Wood has successfully addressed theological and political issues, and avoids the platitudes that can spoil work of this nature.

Subversive Complicity was on view at The Lab May 1-24, 2008.

Veronica Graham: Bonus Map

Veronica Graham's exhibit at CellSpace is in the mode of a particular strain of contemporary art activity: the handmade simulation of an industrial artifact. Bonus Map covers the exhibition space with nearly 2,000 silkscreened cloth tiles, each roughly four inches square. The tiles are repetitions of perhaps 20 or so images, in the vernacular of landscape. The overall effect is of patterned wallpaper.

The title Bonus Map comes from video games: the constructed topographies that aren't included in the initial release, expanding the game's territory of play. In her artist statement, Graham namechecks "The Legend of Zelda" and "The Secret of Mana," but the digital reference points are muted by the recessive colors (mellow blues and browns) and by the style of the images, which echo Japanese woodblock prints and decorative painting on knick-knacks. Bonus Map feels "digital" in the way that needlepoint can be evaluated as a prototype for pixel art.

Graham's "wallpaper," being handmade and modular, is able to be more organic in its patterning than factory-made wallpaper. The landscape vignettes themselves draw from a variety of perspectives and proximities: some are birds-eye views, some are frontal or side views, some are at the scale of a stand of trees, some zoom in to a cluster of pinecones.

One particularly appealing device is the construction of long meandering rivers out of two prints of top-down views of water, one running straight and one with a curve. By linking and turning these tiles, Graham has made snaking waterways that wiggle diagonally through the grid, like sections of digressive pipework making arabesques from novel combinations of straight sections and elbows. Sometimes at the end of one of these aerial-view runs, the next tile shows a river wending through a ravine, disappearing toward a horizon line, or a cluster of ducks set against decorative ruffles of waves. The disjunctive POVs are equalized by the logic of the grid and the adhesion of pattern.

The contiguous coherency of macro and micro (magnified snowflakes set next to shrunken cloud formations) and the pseudo-cubist fragmenting of locale (as though all these views were sliding across the turning facets of a crystal with planes that manage to be perpendicular to the third dimension) give one a feeling of mastery over the space. The spectator's eye becomes godlike, not bound by stereoscopy, able to take in multiple aspects of the world in one blink, laid out into one plan. The world is your Rubik's cube.

This mastery is also transparently delusional. Ornamental wallpaper--at least the sort that traffics in floral design--evokes a peculiar form of nostalgia, the type that brings into focus precisely what it denies. Floral wallpaper is an obstruction that's been clothed as a portal. If Bonus Map doesn't quite propose infinite space bound in a nutshell, it proposes at least an ecosystem bound in one--and the nutshell is a device of our own making, whether it's composed of sheetrock or of luminous pixels. It plays with the pleasure we take in the illusion of space spreading out farther and farther before us, while the actuality of space closes us in.

Bonus Map was on view at CELLspace May 1-25, 2008.

Albert Oehlen: Paintings 1988-2008

To followers of Albert Oehlen's work it is great pleasure to see his paintings out here in San Francisco, finally; and this might be another sign of how the city is becoming a global art center. This would mean that the aesthetic taste in the Bay Area, long judged as provincial, is venturing to join the rest of the greater artworld. But to be fair, the majority of the American art viewing public is not familiar with Oehlen's work. As a quick review, Oehlen's career began in the wild neo-expressionism of the '80s along with his more famous friend Martin Kippenberger (R.I.P.). They were like the Lennon & McCartney of the German art movement, or perhaps more accurately, the Gene Wilder- & Richard Pryor tandem that brought comedy while deflating the highly exaggerated pretensions of the artworld. Wasn't it Kippenberger that bought a Gerhardt Richter painting and turned it into a dining table? Meanwhile, Oehlen's strategies were performed on more formal levels, bordering on a farcical kind of conceptualism that nonetheless bludgeoned the conventions of painting to the point of ridicule. Perhaps this is the reason why Oehlen's popularity took a little bit longer. To begin with paintings are already slower to ingest, much more by being abstract. A handful of these types of works from 1988 to 2008 were recently exhibited at John Berggruen Gallery.

Untitled (Gelbes Kreuz), 1988, oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches

These works from '88 to the present do have a knack of providing difficulty for the viewer. It seems Oehlen doesn't desire to build "meaning"--that mystifying impulse leading to claims of painting's "directness" or "ontological being-ness" romanticized by painters such as Van Gogh or Pollock. Rather, Oehlen is an iconoclast who dismantles established codes of picture making. The contourless lines on his paintings don't quite congeal to make form, or whatever might be construed as form gets obliterated in the next by bewildering gestural sweeps. The impression given is that the marks, if they can be animated with anthropomorphic character in the role of figuration, merely float into anti-gravitational disarray clumsily bumping into each other in a palimpsest play of screens. There are no Cezannean passages that weave the picture formally tight, or classical reassuring narratives for the viewer to work with. By all means the paintings should fall apart, and the most common question asked is whether they are even finished or not.

Right of Way Forever, 1998, oil on canvas, 76 3/4 x 76 3/4 inches

Paradoxically though, the claims above turn out to be the very qualities that make Oehlen a great painter. Of course at this point you might realize that issues of craft or skill are not at stake here, although Oehlen definitely has those qualities, albeit veiled. Nor is he popular right now as a marauding unskilled naïf like so many out there, but rather his mettle can be attributed to his fearless attack on what can be possibly painted and deemed acceptable to what painting is. Take for example his 1998 painting Right of Way Forever, where he refers to John Graham, an obscure Russian-American surrealist as his muse, and proceeds to do a portrait in the crudest possible manner: green and beady-eyed donning a slug-spaghetti mustache, with three solar-anus-flower cherub heads over commercial print color pattern. It defies logic, and, more specifically, the politics of taste. Oehlen therefore arrives at a time when painting seems to have reached its end, as not too long ago its proclaimed pangs of death still rattle within the halls of academia. The conventions of painting are exhausted they say and to continue in the ways of the past would be tantamount to grave digging and zombie existence. You can almost hear the Marxist hymn of tradition being a nightmare on the brains of the living. But Oehlen comes along and turns this critique on its ear and uses the very same critique to make paintings that turn out to be post-painting, or in his own words, "bad painting." And since then he has been its greatest champion.

These selected works from 1988-2008 have that way of expressing negation. If aesthetics can take the appearance of negation as when individual consciousness goes against prevailing cultural attitudes, then what we have at last is a political act. Oehlen in an interview ("Ordinary Madness," J. Heiser and J. Verwoert, Frieze, 10/10/03) would say, "Criticism is just another form, like comedy and tragedy. Criticism is like a label on a picture. What actually happens is something else. Something that eludes control." Thus, Oehlen's painterly provocations in the role of critical practice work as inoculation to painting's conventional disease. Critiques of painting done through painterly means can only preserve the vitality of this practice and its continued presence.

Untitled, 2005, oil on canvas, 70 7/8 x 59 inches

A final observation: midway looking through the "Untitled" of 2005 you're jarred by the recognition of a cartoon hand giving you a big thumbs up, as if saying, "Get it? OK, you win!"

Albert Oehlen: Paintings 1988-2008 was on view at John Berggruen Gallery from April 8th through May 17th, 2008.

East of the West

Seventeen artists were invited to show their works at the SomArts Cultural Center in San Francisco under a commonality: "East." This exhibition is not just a mere representation of Eastern artists; it represents different stages of exploitation of minorities by western societies. In the context of this exhibition the word "minority" could be seen as a group that is not recognized as "one of us" but rather considered "others" by a dominant group. Oftentimes, art that is produced by the minority is packaged as art that demands the viewers' special understanding, curiosity, and exotic taste. This assumption comes from the notion that there is a fundamental difference between minority art and the art that is created by the dominant group. The recognition of the differences by both of these groups is the exact cause of the demarcation between them.

The notion of a "boundary" needs to be addressed in order to examine the demarcation between two groups. The boundary which is set by westerners to label minority artists as "different" is playing a major role in making a clear distinction between the two groups. In this case, that boundary is functioning as East. Each artist is responding and reacting in different ways to this notion of East in order to work with the boundary, to be aware of the existence of the boundary, or to completely deny the notion of it altogether.

The artists' dominant reaction against the notion of the boundary is called, "safeness." In this stage, artists choose to stay within that boundary, which in turn becomes a safety net for artists to be exploited by existing society without a sense of guilt. Artists who exist within that boundary often accept this circumstance and use it to their advantage; consciously and unconsciously. This is a type of attitude that is expected and welcomed by both groups because it eliminates friction between the two groups. Artists combine the best qualities of the two and present the work as something "exotic" and "different." Ala Ebtekar represents a controversial figure, the president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, as a pop icon in Ahmadinejad Jacket with a touch of humor. Taravat Talepasand expresses the duality of her identity; American and Persian, sensuality and sorrow, past and present, through beautiful graphite self-portraits with influences of Persian miniature drawings. These types of artwork are loved and accepted by westerners because they meet all the criteria of being minority art according to western standards. They are beautiful. They are exotic. They are different and they are fine with being different.

L: Ala Ebtekar, "Koteh Ahmadinejad (Admadinejad Jacket)" R: Taravat Palepasand, "Suicide Is Painless II"

The most controversial reaction against the phenomenon is "awareness." This is a stage where artists are aware of that boundary and make a conscious decision about the placement of their existence within that boundary. Adrian Piper made a clear statement regarding the notion of the boundary in an existing society and an individual's placement relation to that boundary in her piece titled Cornered 20 years ago. Piper incorporated a re-positioning strategy by directly placing society, the viewers, in her position, which is the corner, in order to emphasize that boundary. Amir Esfahani's Step Back is not about juxtaposing "elements of western pop culture with my ancient Persian heritage. It does not focus on coming to terms with my identity in a culture that is so different from my own. It is not about immigration, detainment, or my feelings towards the war in Iraq." The piece is about western artists deeming minority artists as "different." In his piece, all the indigenous looking shields started at the same place. Due to different circumstances, some shields were able to move forward and some of them had to move back. As a result, each shield is functioning and existing in different places with different outcomes. However, regardless of their present placements, the nature of each object remains the same, a shield. Regardless of the artists' geopolitical, social, and cultural background, each artist's work has the right to be viewed as an "artwork" not an "artwork by a specific group." However, it is difficult for viewers to go beyond that boundary once we recognize the difference. Esfahani intentionally dispersed his installation on the floor, and by doing so, the piece is overlapping with other works in the gallery. Quietly and firmly, the piece is commenting on surrounding works. At the same time, the piece is also inviting viewers to take a step back and observe the gallery space itself. Dina Danish is another artist who is aware of the minority's "specificity, certainty, and definition" set by western society. However, the artist is intentionally rejecting the idea of portraying herself as an individual who is "brought up in _____" and is of "_____ descent". She is even refusing to "walk like an ____". In her video piece, "All My Life I Had to Fit Cheese on Toast", she introduces toast as a symbol of convention or norm. By juxtaposing absurd elements with toast, viewers are in position to re-interpret the unconventional uses of the toast. Danish's misrepresentation of her subject matter, toast, is opening a door for viewers to come in and re-exam the "norm" or "conventional meaning" that is set by the dominant society. The act of re-interpretation on misrepresented art needs to be demanded by more people in broader contexts.

L: Amir Esfahani, "Step Back" R: Dina Danish, "All my life I had to fit cheese on toast"

The third option that minority artists have in the midst of exploitation is staying in the state of "denial." This might be a clever way to present oneself in this pre-packaged exhibition by refusing one's identity or by removing oneself from the notion of the boundary itself. Bessma Khalaf talks about objects of desire in a video piece called, "Black Gold." There is no indication of her cultural and political identity in the work itself. She could argue that the work has no relation to her being a minority artist. That might be true. However, regardless of her intention, the work will be read as a part of the "East" in the context of this exhibition. Regardless of the artist's intention, that boundary will be imposed upon the artwork due to society's preconception of looking at the work as "different."

Bessma Khalaf, "Black Gold"

Some artists are perfectly fine with being perceived as different by others. They accept it as a part of their identity. Some artists struggle to be seen as who they are, not who they are supposed to be. Some artists believe their sincere attitude to themselves and their work is more important than how others will perceive their work. It is important to recognize the relationship between an individual's existence, decision-making, and the responsibility that comes with it. In order to fulfill one's purpose, it is vital to examine the placement of one's existence in relation to the "boundary". Whether one is in a state of comfort, awareness, or denial, one needs to recognize where she/he stands in order to take responsibility of their representations.

East of the West will be on view at SomArts Cultural Center through June 17, 2008.

How I Learned To... Weston Teruya & Michele Carlson

Everyone remembers sitting in a classroom, staring out the window, bored, distracted, or daydreaming. If you're lucky you also remember moments of getting swept away by a poem or an equation. Classrooms go with us, carried around in our heads long after we've left them--an imprint, the effects of which follow us silently the rest of our lives.

Weston Teruya and Michele Carlson take a closer look at the personal and political implications of our educational spaces, transforming the gallery at Intersection for the Arts into a staged classroom that will induce a rush of personal memories for each spectator. All of us as former students have a shared vocabulary of the requisite layout and props--a phalanx of desks facing forward, the teacher's desk, walls lined with bookshelves, charts and an American flag.

The framework for Teruya and Carlson's piece is Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, a work that explores the lives of under-represented peoples in the U.S. Zinn designed a wall chart for the classroom, a timeline laid out in five pastel-colored rows punctuated by photos, stories and symbols of important events. Teruya and Carlson have recreated the chart, which runs in a mural around the gallery wall. The one difference with Teruya and Carlson's version is that it slowly devolves from orderly rows into an unruly tangle--a suggestion that perhaps histories can't be drawn in straight lines, but are more complex, messier.

The artists also comment on classroom design, which for the most part draws inspiration from an institutional aesthetic with straight lines and bland generic shapes that try to impose order on creative movement and individuality. Teruya and Carlson's installation follows the grid for the most part but also shows signs of breaches, chinks in the antiseptic decor, impulses to break out of the linear confines. A jumbled mass of desks piled on top of each other at the back of the room climbs toward the ceiling--a twisting column of energy. A bookshelf is pushed slightly askew, behind it a secret wall lined with little notes handwritten on pieces of paper. Students in LA and San Francisco were asked to give one piece of advice to their peers on getting through the school year. The messages are whispers, as if the wisdom they're dispensing is knowledge that isn't meant for the classroom, that's earned through real-life experience and not books: "Don't lie." "Everyone has a clique." "The teacher knows your handwriting." "Take 5th Street--it's safer." "Be yourself." "Sometimes your family argues all the time, but if you can try not to get involved."

On the back wall of the gallery, standard issue metal library shelves run the length of the room, lined with musty old volumes whose spines have been erased. The only titles that remain are books about national identity and history--The World's Great Thinkers, Gentle Jungle, Divided They Stand, Making of a Nation, American Country--a litany of topics that underlines the idea of the classroom as a space where our political identities are forged and perhaps misrepresented.

The writing trays of every desk is filled with doodles, notes and illustrations, expressions of minds distracted, most likely longing to be somewhere else. Some of the graffiti is authentic. Some was added for the project. All of it seems convincing: "C.M. wasn't here," "Shut your fu**ing face, uncle fu**er!" (from South Park), "I'm so bored, bored, bored," a drawing of Lincoln, a tic-tac-toe game.

A classroom needs a certain amount of order, but what if some of the rules could be broken, rewritten so that students could integrate the lessons of their lives--what they learn outside of school and outside the canon--into the educational process? Teruya and Carlson suggest our classrooms should be recognized for what they are: a collection of personal histories that can't be forced to follow one mandated script.

How I Learned To... is on view at Intersection for the Arts though May 24th.

Amateurs

Artists--perhaps in response to the increasingly craven art market--are creating another art world that explores other ways to make culture. In league with progressive curators--or acting as curators--many artists are interested, among several other fields of inquiry, in the work of untrained, non-professional makers of visual culture. Amateurs is presented through August 9th at the CCA Wattis Institute by Ralph Rugoff, former director of the Wattis returning from his new home in London for one final project.

Eighteen artists are included in the exhibition, which can be broken out into three general approaches to the subject.

Artists archiving amateur artists' work
Both Johanna Billing and Phil Collins make their own work which centers around the work of amateurs. Billing presents a videotape of a Croatian children's chorus rehearsing a treacly Disney song. According to the catalogue this is an essay on the impact of globalized economics. Phil Collins' silkscreens reproduce amateur music reviews by a young unknown, Steven Patrick Morrissey, who later became a well-known rock musician. Cameron Jamie continues his brilliant explication of the underside of American culture (see his Backyard Wrestling work) with photo documentation of the scary-for-all-the-wrong-reasons amateur Halloween spook houses.

Cameron Jamie, Spook House (Hangman), 2003. C-print

Another subgenre is actual work by amateurs. Long March Project, a Beijing collective, shows selections from an archive they solicited of 16,000 traditional paper cutter's works, including statements by and photographs of the artists. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane show video documentation and sculpture by a variety of folk artists and performing artists in England. One very short video shows a half dozen people on a stage competing, apparently, to blow the most smoke from their pipes. Jim Shaw shows a selection of his thrift store painting collection, enhanced by his deadpan and accurate titles.

Andrea Bowers makes drawings depicting people participating in civil disobedience; their political actions are celebrated and aestheticized in her works, but the notion of amateur is stretched particularly thin here.

Andrea Bowers, Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Drawing - Go Perfectly Limp and Be Carried Away, 2004, (detail) triptych. Graphite on paper

Artists collaborating with or inveigling amateurs into their work
Jeremy Deller, Harrell Fletcher, Yoshua Okun and Javier Tellez all show video of performances by amateurs, organized by the artists. Deller organized a large-scale reenactment of a labor/police riot of the 80s, including some of the actual original participants. Fletcher organized a performance of Shakespeare in a retirement home. Okun enlisted street people in East LA to improvise soap opera stories using a furniture store as their set. Tellez reenacted Oedipus Rex using actors from a mental hospital wearing Noh masks to particularly wooden effect.

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 17 June 2001. Video still

Jeffrey Vallance wrote letters to every US Senator asking for an original drawing. The responses he received, ranging from brush-offs to drawings by aides to two or three actual attempts by Senators, are on view in a grid of identical frames. Like so much of his work, it is tragicomic and hard to stop reading.

Artists making work outside their fields thus becoming amateurs themselves
Josh Greene, Vallance and Eric Wesley take on wholly new professions. Greene offers to hold regular hours meeting with the public as an unlicensed therapist in the gallery. Vallance founded and operates his own micro-history museum in a trunk (on Richard Nixon), not one of the more appropriate inclusions in the exhibition. Eric Wesley researches starting his own micro-scale tobacco-growing and marketing business, a work of yet undiscovered interest.

Jennifer Bornstein, Hirsch Perlman and Simon Starling make art in ways that force them to take up new skills. Bornstein makes short, extremely low budget 8mm films with a DIY aesthetic. Perlman makes night photographs using primitive cameras. Starling makes projects in which he finds himself forced to learn boatbuilding and the mechanics of how to make a solar-powered moped and shows the detritus of his efforts.

In an often useful catalogue essay, John Roberts traces the history of modernist and contemporary art's attraction to the amateur. He points out that artists began to embrace failure and incompetence as traits that inherently rejected the values of the salon and academy and the artist's middle class supporters. The dilemma for Roberts is that today "Staged incompetence...[has] become the modern academic language of the moment." He adds "This rejection and its strategies of incompetence-as-competence are taught."

The artist-as-amateur possesses, therefore, a particular kind of ventriloquized voice in contemporary culture. The identification with technical incompetence or awkwardness, the use of low forms, the staging of 'failure,' or the placement of the production of work in the hands of nonartists signifies the artist as someone who speaks through that which is "other."

Roberts concludes with a plea for real top-to-bottom democratization of the society, a democratization that the shared stage between artists and amateurs only parodies, for him. That Rugoff included Robert's essay, which often questions the premises of the show, is greatly to his credit.

Rugoff's curatorial essay argues that the "conceptual adventurousness" of the amateur "is a kind of rebuke to the self-imposed limits accepted by professional artists." I am at times uneasy when I see artists working in ways that feel exploitative or derivative; at the same time I am attracted, like Rugoff, to the energy, wit, honesty and embrace of life so often reflected in the work of amateurs. It has been one of the breakthroughs in curating of recent years that the work of amateurs as well as artifacts, material culture as well as fine art, are finding their ways into museum exhibitions. The Wattis Institute, under both Rugoff and his successor, Jens Hoffman, has been a Bay Area leader in this regard and should be acknowledged for that valuable contribution.

For more information about this and other exhibitions at the Wattis Institute visit www.wattis.org

Feral

Every once in a while I walk into an art show and find myself happily disoriented. It's a rare feeling of being instantly affected by the work, without initially knowing why. And to clarify, what I'm talking about is a feeling beyond the intellectual recognition that something is well executed, interesting, or smart. It only happens about once a year and I think it has less to do with the art itself and more to do with a certain chemistry of the situation. It also depends on factors such as how much art i've seen in the same day, my current emotional state and what's going on in my life at the moment. When I walked from the gritty world of 6th and Market Street up the steps of the Luggage Store gallery I was beginning a night of visiting galleries -- excited to be out and with friends on friday night -- and I was immediately drawn in to the world of 'Feral.' It was early and not too crowded. I had space to move from one tableau to the next, relishing in the dense details of collaged wall pieces, the elegant iconic forms of cut paper murals and the layers of tattered lace and fabric sewn together and strung like spider webs in hidden spaces. I wondered at the vast amount of work resulting from the collaboration between Swoon and Monica Canilao, and how the whole thing felt so specifically crafted for the space. I learned later that the artists spent 2 weeks living in the gallery with a crew of around 10 helpers working under their direction to transform the space, incorporating pre-made elements transported from the artists studios in Oakland and New York.

As I conveyed my excitement about the show to others I found myself using the metaphor of music. I was initially concerned that my enthusiasm for the work may turn out to be a shallow pleasure lacking substance, like a catchy pop-song -- seductive at first but turning to bubblegum after a couple of listens. I went back a week later to see the show a second time. I found there were layers to explore, details I had missed and stories still unfolding. Unpacking the music metaphor; the show is like an album with tracks featuring guest artists. There are distinct chords and rhythms provided by Swoon and Monica throughout that tie it all together, with additional voices and instrumentation adding layers-- creating a rich orchestration.