Pizza, Beer and Football at Flashpoint

At Flashpoint Gallery this past weekend, local artist Patrick McDonough invited visitors to join him for an evening of pizza, beer and football-watching. The event accompanied his solo show reck room, which humorously transforms the gallery space into a suburban American rec room/man cave. Complete with hybrid foosball/ping-pong table and mini-fridge, the exhibition features a number of objects that encourage physical interaction. On Sunday, visitors activated these pieces as they huddled around a live screening of the Redskins game, sipped PBR and scurried around the gallery floor to catch renegade ping-pong balls.

McDonough’s work has an ironic bro-love, frat boy sensibility that he uses to explore notions of domesticity, masculinity and play. In the gallery, he presents a variety of different media, from artist-made quilts to cyanotypes. It’s clear that McDonough wants to trouble the line dividing art and craft, as well as high and low art. This is evident in his digitally-printed woven rugs, which lay on the floor around his game table. For the pieces, he scribbled phrases like “I Love Sherrie Levine” on photographs of famous athletes. Later, he sent these JPEGs to a company that turns someone’s favorite family photograph into a carpet. Most of us have seen these company advertisements in catalogs, but here the artist cleverly uses their service to reference the icons of 90s appropriation art. Other pieces in the show include chandeliers crafted from beer koozies and scented candles with fragrances such as tobacco, bourbon, and sex on the beach. In the seating area of the exhibition, there’s a large abstract painting that outlines the shots taken during a basketball game, and a photo slide show depicting the mountainscape found on a Coors Light bottle, which marries the bottle’s cold activated technology with references to 19th century landscape painting.

If I were to give a character to McDonough’s work, I’d say it lies somewhere in between Tom Marioni’s Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, Al Bundy’s NO MA’AM club, appropriation art and color field painting. In reck room he pokes fun at what might be a “masculine” approach to art making. And as McDonough transforms the intimate gallery into a recreation room, he also invites the visitor to question the objects at hand and the environment they inhabit: what separates a domestic space from a gallery? How does this change our relationship to the objects within the space? And how does this determine the way we interact with each other?

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of football. To be even more honest, I hate football. However, I really enjoyed the exhibition and the PBR. It’s nice to see a thought-provoking show in DC that isn’t afraid to take risks. Reck room is on view at Flashpoint through October 9, so go see it.