Presenting the tenth iteration of Artist / City with Frogs, an exhibition of new work by Brook Hsu and Louis Eisner in Dubois, Wyoming by Bortolami Gallery. As with each Artist / City project, the exhibition was developed and site chosen in close collaboration with the artists, with the venue functioning as both a novel context for the presentation of contemporary art and an integral component of the exhibition.

Staged within an operational laundromat in Dubois, the exhibition is a retelling of the ancient Greek comedy by Aristophanes of the same name. Frogs, the play, tells the story of a katabasis – a descent to the mythological underworld – undertaken by Dionysus, the God of theater, to revive the late tragic playwright Euripides. Within the context of the exhibition, Hsu and Eisner view the buffalo skull, a permanent fixture of the entryway to the laundromat created by the artist Vic Lemmon, the establishment’s previous owner, as a metaphorical portal to the stage on which the fable comes to life. Rich with references to the history of art, both modern and classical, as well as nineteenth century American westward expansionism, the artworks in the exhibition serve as the artists’ own katabases, conduits in search of a greater understanding of our time.

Titled after both the exhibition and the play, Hsu’s paintings Frogs reinterpret a poster for Buffalo Bill’s Congress of Rough Riders of the World, a traveling entertainment spectacle which introduced prototypical horsemen: the American cowboy, American Indian, Cossack, Mexican Vaquero, Riffian Arab, and South American Gaucho. Inspired by an advertisement depicting this international band of machos in their traditional headwear – and Buffalo Bill riding a bucking bullfrog – Hsu renders the scene anew with the riders themselves as frogs, simultaneously referencing another 19th century work: Japanese artist Kawanabe Kyosai’s satirical print Fashionable Battle of Frogs (1864). Rather than critique earlier representations of cultural difference and their inherent inequalities, Hsu uses them instead to reflect on the past, expressing painting’s ability to stir and maintain conflicting interpretations, memories, and emotions.

Hsu’s paintings entitled Carry the Donkey are an homage to Robert Bresson’s film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), depicting the film’s two protagonists: Marie, a young farm girl, and her beloved donkey, Balthazar. Drawing on Andy Warhol’s silk-screened repetitions over fields of solid color, Hsu painstakingly renders the repeated images over a vibrant green, foregoing the aid of a replicable printing process. Carry the Donkey once again nods to Aristophanes’ play, and in particular to a scene in which Dionysus walks alongside his slave, Xanthias, who rides a donkey and toys with the semantics of the word “baggage”.

FROGS.

Brekekekex co-ax.
Co-ax, co-ax, co-ax,
Brekekekex co-ax !
Our song we can double
Without the least trouble:
Brekekekex co-ax.

Sing we now, if ever hopping
Through the sedge and flowering rushes;
In and out the sunshine flopping.
We have sported, rising, dropping.
With our song that nothing hushes.

Sing, if e’er in days of storm
Safe our native oozes bore us,
Staved the rain off, kept us warm,
Till we set our dance in form,
Raised our hubble-bubbling chorus :

Brekekekex co-ax, co-ax !

Excerpt from Frogs by Aristophanes, 405 B.C.

— Courtesy of Bortolami Gallery