Richie Budd at Tortilleria La Popular
by Gary Smith and Ronnie Smith

Richie Budd’s MFA show at the “Tortilleria La Popular” is an approach to compacting the neo-nauseousness of our unchanging consumerist self.  If you have not encountered one of Richie’s assemblages, when you do see one, you know it’s a Budd. His hot-glue gun wielding days have moved forward to a more “refined” state, if you can even now call his work refined. The assemblages are a more controlled fiasco of well thought out sculptural organisms.When you enter the gallery the first overpowering thing you see is the assemblage “Bon Voyage Kinesthesia de Pileon”. The sensory intake incites neurons to overwhelmingly acquire the informational aspects in a form of stunned surprise. A high overload of meaning is mixed with messages on every scale.  “Bon Voyage Kinesthesia de Pieon”, with its placement of objects, isolates a viewer’s attention to one point and then leads it to another. The media used is media itself. The piece has objects of desire, food, and one’s of fear of senility and age; an old folks port-a-potty, and the list goes on to affront and to amuse the viewer. The message is of the societal farce; we consume, eat, defecate, and at all times delight ourselves in the little pieces of our own happiness. When seen in it’s compositional glory, one is uneasy in smiling or taking the thing seriously, either way you feel like you have been politely insulted, and are somewhat happy about the event. In truth there is something to be said about how we process our surroundings. Budd has hit the mark in adding to our sensory graffiti, and the viewer is quite cable of ignoring his message. We take the pieces apart and see them as in offensive, we walk through the smoke machine smoking and the bubble machine blowing and then come up with words such “a gimmick” and “clever”. The fact that you are not insulted is insulting as a whole to how we now perceive our world and at what value we take it. Budd’s piece “Crunked on No Limit” is the introduction piece at the “Tortilleria La Popular”. In fact the viewer overlooks the piece due to the borage of information at the center of the gallery floor. The piece reflects Budd’s association to his part in the perfume industry. What is Budd saying about the whole of his involvement in society is that we contribute to the world at large. The piece is an elegant display of perfumes on a silver platter; there is no mystery as to why it is representational of the artist. Had it not been for this bit of information about the artist, you might just believe it is more of the same, a piece to overwhelm our olfactory senses in this case, and to some especially in this context, more pollution to innervate our already desensitized selves.  Budd does not stand above our own experience in the grotesque, rather admits some of our human relationship to the world we all help create. As at last you begin to soak up the ambivalence and enjoy the show you notice the spheres attached in different locales throughout the gallery, if not being informed of the nature of these “balls” you might just ignore them. The piece as a whole or pieces are Budd’s “Wall Moles”. Maybe they do not look the part, but you get the point in that the value of art in perceiving it is not so much the beauty of the marks, rather the perceived value of a statement.  All in all, from the unrestrained assemblages to the passively positioned moles, the sarcasm of the work is blunt, and they all challenge you in different ways. The social, to the personal, and the somewhat ridiculous are the perfect unifiers to our experience in the way we perceive, act out, and are acted upon by the world at large.
Voices of Art Magazine V14.2 www.voamag.com

Rating:

Viewed: 75 times