It’s hard to describe Engage Projects’ joint show featuring the art of Los Angeles-based multimedia artist David Leggett and longtime Chicago painter Phyllis Bramson. Any formal linkage or stylistic flair you notice between the exhibit’s works will be immediately rendered unimportant by their content: these tableaus of contemporary culture are top-full of a noxious pessimism. Insecurity is the name of the game here, so much so that you’re apt to forget that you’re supposed to be enjoying yourself.

        Never since the minimalists wrought their obdurate havoc in the 60s has human neuroticism been so fluidly distilled into art-objects. If minimalist sculptures are histrionic—seeking viewers’ attention through displays of theatrical grandiosity—Leggett and Bramson’s works are narcissistic. They want to be lauded but are so certain of their hideousness that they lash out at any potential admirers. The seven paintings which constitute Bramson’s contribution are rife with pastiches of the Asian tradition. In Spring Brings Love, But Like Snowfall, Slowly, Slowly, certain trappings of Japanese ukiyo-e prints—finely delineated figures in unmoving poses, snow-filled landscapes, Shinto shrines—have been scattered throughout the picture. Similar in its appropriation of a traditional Eastern subject is Bramson’s Mary Mary Is Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?, in which the central darkly-complected female figure assumes a seated pose characteristic of Indian depictions of the goddess Lakshmi.

        Throughout Bramson’s portion of the show, I found myself recalling Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows,” an essay which discusses cultural encounters between Japan—one of Bramson’s favored sources of borrowed imagery—and the Occident. In Japan and other East Asian countries, Tanizaki argues, locals tend to “content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent, we resign ourselves to it as inevitable. If light is scarce then light is scarce, we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.” The Westerner, on the other hand, is “determined always to better his lot. From candle to oil lamp, oil lamp to gaslight, gaslight to electric light—his quest for a brighter light never ceases, he spares no pains to eradicate even the minutest shadow.” While Tanizaki’s essay deals in particulars, the historical themes he discusses are universal: the subtlety of Asian aesthetic frameworks is, in almost every instance of their encounter, completely annihilated by Western cultural cosmopolitanism.

          This seems to be a central theme of Bramson’s paintings: in the show’s riffs on the Japanese tradition, her insertion of heightened anime-style faces and use of distinctly Western brush-handling undermines the aesthetic tradition she’s borrowing from. (The flatness of most ukiyo-e works is blown to the wayside by her slight impasto, a fact which left me more nonplussed than I’d like to admit.) Her take on Lakshmi statuettes, too, eschews the intimate spirituality usually associated with such artworks, exoticizing them into mere trinkets: replacing the lotus flowers typically held by Lakshmi’s raised hands are two watering cans, out of which viscous liquid oozes onto the kitschy flower beds on either side of her. Topping things off is a gaudy peacock, which looks down upon her figure.

        What’s less clear is what Bramson believes concerning these cultural encounters. Is she critiquing colonialism? Encouraging bricolage? Attempting to subvert dominant ideologies by finding some midpoint between the two? Who knows. These works are as aimless as they are immediate.

         David Leggett’s portion of the show is more digestible, but fraught with the same banal self-hate as Bramson’s. Leggett’s medium is caked with levity: he collages figurative drawings with magazine clippings, comic frames, and neon felt lettering that you probably haven’t seen outside of elementary school science fair presentations. These rudimentary means accentuate the pathetic qualities of Leggett’s work, which practically explains itself: one of his smaller works apposes an illustrated Black man smoking while wearing clown makeup, a cartoon-style anthropomorphic fish jester, and cut-out text reading “REAL ONES ARE DEPRESSED.”[I broke my shoelace] Another features the same smoking Black man, this time accompanied by two hazy black forms to which eyes have been affixed. “PEPSI” and “HENNESSY” [I’m not here to make friends] are the messages printed in its corners.

          Witnessing this collision between hip language and turbulent neuroticism is like hearing someone tell a lie they’re hoping you’ll see through—awkward and discomfiting. I don’t know whether I should be admiring their compositional strength or empathizing with their apparent lack of confidence. Not-so-subtle racial undertones in many of the works shown exacerbate this sensation. An eclectic assortment featuring a drawn Black man with a voluminous beard, a cartoonish white woman reading, and a grayscale photograph of Bill Cosby features the headline “Freest Black man in America.”[ We tell these stories at night to sleep better. My bed is too hard tho.] A larger work, this one a diptych, juxtaposes a snarling two-tailed black cat [Everybody can’t go]—one which appears conspicuously similar to the logo of the Black Panther Party—with a photograph depicting a Black man sailing. The radical cause fought for by the Black Panthers—which abided by the Marxist idea that history operates teleologically, with the proletarian revolution as its inevitable outcome—is completely absent in the insouciant boatman they’re supposedly fighting for. The discomfort exuded by these works resides in the tension between grand historical narratives—namely, that of Black empowerment—and the banal, unsatisfying truth of everyday life.

        What throughlines are there between Bramson’s appropriative paintings and Leggett’s bathetic assemblages? Other than a subliminal uneasiness vaguely related to race, not a ton. In style and in subject, they’re night and day. Yet their cumulative presentation seems to gesture at the increasingly absurd ideological landscape in which we find ourselves: like Leggett, it seems we’ve lost the ability to see ourselves as working toward a greater good. Desperate for some unwavering purpose, we tighten our grip on steady providers of aesthetic gratification. Yet like Bramson, we squeeze too tight, perverting whatever beauty they once possessed.

Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.