Dr. Lakra

As people gathered for the opening of “Monomito” (Monomyth), Dr. Lakra’s second solo exhibition at this gallery, one thing became clear: Lakra is an artist who straddles two worlds—of underground, punk-oriented transgressors and the contemporary art scene—simultaneously and with great success. No coincidence, surely, since “the tattoo is primal parent of the visual arts,” as Kathy Acker writes in Empire of the Senseless (1988). One could imagine Lakra uttering a very similar phrase.

The adjective primal certainly comes to mind when entering this show as both a welcome surprise and a congruent development of Lakra’s practice. His avid collecting and his research on tattoos have led him to an entirely new body of three-dimensional work. Focusing on the taboos, myths, and rituals that surround not only tattoos but also pop culture, he offers here seventy totem-like sculptures in bronze and wax casts of layered objects that might have been found in any flea market from Mexico City to Pyongyang.

Blurring the boundaries between fetish and pastiche, art and folklore, these sculptures are calmly poised in vitrines and on pedestals against large black-and-white wall murals of photographs of the newly created deities for our global village: ancient masks from all over the world atop classical antique sculpture bodies or classical antique heads over bodies that belong to a different culture entirely, Mexican over Thai, African over Greek, and so on. Overall, the exhibition gives a double meaning to monomito: no longer just the single myth of the mono or primate that we are, but also ironically anything but. This show is as poly as they come.