Hyper Effigy

Including an essay by Grace Hadland  
and Introduction by Mathew Timmons  

Cover design Dameon Waggoner
Photographic Documentation David Weldzius

Paperback, Full Color, 102 Pages    
ISBN : 978-1-947322-07-3  
Cover Price : $39.00  

The full-color exhibition catalog accompanied the exhibition Hyper Effigy at General Projects and Outside Gallery from April 3 to May 30, 2021. 

In Brian Getnick’s new body of work, he offers two sculptural investigations of icons associated with fascism, terrorism, and the pre-modern past. “Ersatz Fighting Unit” draws inspiration from the 20th century interwar period and features a blue officer (sprouting donkey ears) facing off against a red balaclava wearing revolutionary. In “Abyss Standard” ancestral faces and dream entities merge in statuettes radially arranged to mark a weekly cycle of Trumpian era crisis. In Hyper Effigy, Getnick forwards caricature as a magical language; a grammar of soldiers, trolls, terrorists and skeletons, equipped to dislodge propagandistic representations of the other from their historical ideological functions.

On display in Outside Gallery are a monumental soldier’s head, a cudgel and a red medusa; sculptural props from “Secret Joy”, a performance Getnick directed in 2019 after a journey to Eastern Europe*.

Stills from the performance of Secret Joy at Human Resources Los Angeles 2019 Julie Weitz and Ian Byers Gamber

*travel and research in Eastern Europe for “Secret Joy” and “Ersatz Fighting Unit” was facilitated by the Yiddishkayt Helix Fellowship.