Visual

URA ROBOT

Rebecca SchoenkopfWed. December 19
 

And they are you


“THEY GO INCOGNITO” by STEPH CALVERT

Sheryl Crow once said, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad.” I think I may—may—disagree with her wise words in this case only, since I still wholeheartedly agree with her visionary stance on drinking beer at noon on Tuesday. Because, like, heroin makes you happy, right? And also, when bad things happen to people you hate—that makes you happy, yes? And the Real Housewives of Orange County—they make me very happy, and they are that bad!

But there I was at Siren (“Nothing you need/Everything you want”), leafing through the overpriced vintage (but not nearly so overpriced as at Meow), and there on the walls above the Frida rose skull aprons and the “Fluffer” lingerie (yikes!) were small bits of joy in a frame, and they did make me happy, and badness or lack thereof had no relevance to my life or my outlook. Only the feeling mattered: the feeling of robots, being just like us!

An homage to both Us Weekly and our future robot overlords, Steph Calvert’s “Robots! They’re Just Like Us!” comprises 17 small pieces (one of which, They Take Pics With Friends, itself comprises four pieces hung photo-booth-strip style) documenting robots gone wild. (Like us.) They Double-Fist Their Coffee! declares the title of one. They Have Dance Parties! declare two more. And there they are, double-fisting their coffee, having dance parties, and bringing you joy. The paintings themselves are small, simple. Color fields form the background in all but a couple—tangerine here, cobalt there, maybe a little chartreuse, all deepened with a complementary color swirl, like Joe Goode on the candy-colored cheap. The robots, all presumably engineered in the same lab that gave the Jetsons their maid Rosie, smile with real pleasure, simple pleasure, retarded pleasure, even—the pleasure of a dog in the sun or a four-year-old who just heard a poo joke—as they’re caught, celeb-like, in one candid pap-snap after another. They go nuts for cupcakes!

They recycle!

And, in two particularly delightful canvases featuring large handlebar mustaches, They go incognito!
Your favorites, naturally, will be those that make up the three-part series They Drink Too Much! It has a happy, smiley robot spewing vomit (it brings to mind the too-brilliant Team America: World Police but without the puppet 69ing). It has a robot in a lampshade. It has a third robot doing something else drunky, I forget what.

The only thing they don’t do is take their fat robot asses to the grocery store without makeup and in entirely wrong Juicy sweat suits, only to be caught by the robarazzi shoveling yogurt-covered pretzels directly from the bin into their greedy maws. Do I smell another series?

Besides employing the exclamation mark to thrilling effect, “Robots! They’re Just Like Us!” takes an air-light premise and delivers froth and cupcake icing swirls with a little knowing slyness and just the slightest hint of cynicism at the way our world works—or at least the way the glossies’ editors do.

It’s just damn happy, just like me.

STEPH CALVERT’S “ROBOTS! THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!” SIREN | 2240 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90814 | TUES-FRI 12-6:30PM; SAT 11AM-6PM; SUN 12-5PM | THROUGH JAN 31

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