Erykah Townsend and Alex Vlasov: Cheap Thrills

ERYKAH TOWNSEND AND ALEX VLASOV: CHEAP THRILLS

June 10th – July 2nd, 2022

Abattoir is pleased to present Cheap Thrills, co-curated by the artists Erykah Townsend and Alex Vlasov, respectively a BFA graduate and fourth year student at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Townsend was most recently featured in a solo presentation at SPACES gallery, Bittersweet. Her forthcoming residency at moCa Cleveland this summer will result in a solo presentation there July–November. Vlasov was the subject of a solo show at the Massillon Museum this winter, and an installation at the Roulet Student gallery at CIA.

For their first show with Abattoir, the artists created an installation musing on the allure and pitfalls of consumer-driven society, focusing on the consumption of off-brand goods (dupes) and the culture of discount shopping, both in the mall and at the local Dollar Stores. Product design, product placement, competition, and convenience are analyzed through humor in the work, shaded by an undertone of critique and possibly despair.

Statement by the Artists:

Cheap Thrills is a dive into the world of conceptual art where only one form exists—the readymade. The readymade becomes art only when placed into an art context; it is art that never loses its previous identities and associations. This idea of taking something that already exists in the world and recontextualizing it lays the groundwork for a radical machine that produces the art, but nevertheless challenges its core definition.  

Cheap Thrills summons the rush we obtain in life, cherishing the dopamine erected by finding good deals and creating innovative solutions.  A means of finding happiness at a low cost exists outside of mainstream society. While Pop and Conceptual art usually highlight popular brands such as Campbell’s Soup and Coca-Cola, what about dupes’ position in society? Cheap Thrills is an ode to and adoration of inexpensive brands and lower-class values. 

The artworks in the show take the readymades of dupes as a starting point to explore other portals of examination. By questioning value, and how people value one thing over another according to the morphology of marketing, whether it is a box of cereal, an artist’s signature, or a piece of wood, it will always be more popular based on the structure of brand marketing.  

In a spirited manner, Cheap Thrills underlines historical references to Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. There is also a space for Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ideas. The work reflects play with language and how the visual and descriptive realities speak to each other. The artworks bring sly wit and the prickly sense of humor suggested by artists such as John Baldessari to invoke a critical voice through playfulness and surprise. In the end, you cannot escape a big smile on your face, and Erykah Townsend and Alex Vlasov demonstrate that there is still a place for humor in the art world and that finding joy in cheap and ordinary things is still possible. 

For Cheap Thrills, artists Erykah Townsend and Alex Vlasov enjoin their practices through found objects, cheap knock offs, and wry messages. They jointly align their work within the Duchamp-Warhol lineage, with some Wittgenstein sprinkled in, but they seem to at times align more with Christopher Wool or Richard Prince’s dad jokes and freehanded appropriation--or you might see some Ruscha (the early years). They riff on familiar forms– the grocery list, the to-do list, the receipt. Out of their ironically unironic process comes a series of visual hooks and puns. 

Townsend, an artist deeply comfortable with the uncomfortable, examines a new form of found art within her practice. Riffing on sneakerheads and hypebeasts who favor fashion over function, she sources knock-off Off-Whites and Balenciagas, elevating them to fine art—the stitching and texture placed on a literal pedestal. Repeating the process throughout, she forces audiences to ponder authenticity and veracity. 

Conversely, Vlasov approaches the wadded-up memo or post-it with equal irreverence. Grocery lists filled with off-brands and back-up plans are scaled up onto thick, gooey texture. Elsewhere, canonical books are reduced to their filler text, pocket philosophies for the modern street artist. A scrappily painted “I did my fucking best” is hastily pasted onto a sheet of plywood and precariously balanced on a can of Rustoleum. This work, cheekily titled It Doesn’t Get Any Better, leaves us to wonder if the artist means life or their practice. 

Elsewhere, Townsend riffs on the CAPTCHA and Jasper Johns’ personal Americana. Vlasov  

plays with installation and texture to reconceive value and technique. These louche jabs at the art world from two young artists offer a candid perspective of an often-vitriolic industry that they are now tasked to operate within. They bear the irony and mirror it back with the chaotic and deadpan approach of Gen Z. Why go for the feigned illusion of the name brand art world, they wonder, when you can have more fun with the cheap knockoffs. 

Conceived as an ode to the knockoff, Cheap Thrills expands into larger critiques and meditations on value and commodity. Certain reflexes and responses are elicited by the knockoffs and revelations about the self are made. Those with a certain familiarity with Faygo or Baked Cheese will have Proustian nostalgia. The socioeconomic undercurrents and implications of their appropriations of Target vs. Walmart and name brand vs. off brand intensify the scrutiny around conversations of class and taste. 

John Waters, whose philosophies echo very much throughout this exhibition, famously said “To understand bad taste, one must have very good taste.” As cynical as it is magical this is a world where a urinal is a sculpture and where a splatter commands millions if done by the right hand. Having gone through the rigors and rigamarole of art school, Townsend and Vlasov come out with one big laugh, one last cheap thrill, ready to find their footing in a contemporary art world. 

–Tizziana Baldenebro, June 2022