The humor of bizarrely absurd physical and emotional devastation reaches its zenith in Craig Doty’s large-format staged color scenarios featuring assorted “adults” living through the various depths that life has doled out to them. The more extravagant his imagination, the better are Doty’s still dramas, and he reaches the stratosphere when he shows us a young woman with a shock of scraggly blonde hair sitting on a bed and clawing at the sheets in a state of hyperbolic panic. Insane graffiti are scrawled on the wall next to her and we can understand her psychosis when we look at the wall behind her, where we see an acoustic guitar hanging with a “Slayer” sticker and a sticker advertising “Capitalist Casual Ties” affixed to it—a textbook case of cultural schizophrenia. Doty’s message: Enjoy the other person’s symptom. (Michael Weinstein)
Through March 30 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
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