Rainbows, Pyramids and Floating Heads

Science fiction, conspiracy theories and underground cultures have inspired much lore throughout the times. And so it is not surprising that Williamsburg’s Cinders Gallery pays tribute to such topics with “C.H.U.D.Z.,” a group show of paintings, drawings and collages by School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, alumni Alex Barry, San-Francisco-based Richard Coleman and Brooklynite Josh Slater. The artists, in a seeming effort to intrigue, are keeping the meaning of “C.H.U.D.Z.” a secret. Sto, the co-founder of Cinders Gallery, said the group pays homage in their show, and with their acronym to C.H.U.D., an underground American B-horror film from the 1980s that features mutated creatures and citizens who are all victims of a larger government conspiracy.

Coleman’s multi-tiered dynamic geometrical piece takes up two adjacent walls of the gallery. It transforms a side of the gallery into a futuristic, multi-planar, gravity-free parallel universe where bodies are manufactured by rainbows and flowing water miraculously stays upright. His smaller pieces feature the same vibrancy and movement, the same suspended human figures in neon-colored Speedos with rainbows running through their heads, and triangles and circles and lines spinning and moving all around them at the speed of light.

Slater’s collages deal with Egyptian scenes with pyramidal structures, meteors and planets joined in an esoteric space. His series of shrines represent architectural structures with balls of universe, floating stardust, constellations and galaxies, alluding to the mysterious order of the Masons, whose symbol is a pyramid with an eye.

Barry’s sinister drawings are populated by strange creatures partaking in regular human activities. “Ugly People Mating,” is a series of drawings that shows exactly that, strange creatures mating with humans, slithering creatures playing ping pong with a jar of Vaseline in the background and a couple with amputated arms sitting over a bucket of friend chicken thighs. His dark sense of humor is most evident in an untitled piece where creatures frolic in a dark forest, fornicating, listening to records, chopping wood and cheering around a black heart that rises out of a tree stump.

Although the “C.H.U.D.Z.” pieces are very different, the show somehow stays cohesive. Perhaps, the combination of Slater’s mystical spaces, Barry’s representations of the sinister subconscious and Coleman’s surrealistic landscapes somehow hold the key to all the secrets of the universe, if you look hard enough.