Anyone who’s turned on a television or seen a movie should be familiar with the good cop/bad cop paradigm, which we might describe as the tactic of someone grabbing your prejudices and outrage and lifting it to new levels you hadn’t quite prescribed for them, while the other coos in your ear and softly leads you to a place you hadn’t intended to go. If that’s the case, then the title Good Cop / Bad Cop was the perfect choice for Project 4’s ongoing show.
Daniel Davidson’s mixed media works occupy the first floor. Most of his paintings and collages are self-deprecating images that don’t quite fall into the well of bitterness, but they teeter the edge precariously. Alphabet of Hard Knocks, a site-specific collage made to fit the tall atrium space, feels like the memoir of a beer-guzzling, balding, twice divorced man who just retired from his nondescript cubicle job. In other words, the dreary side of Everyman. A drawing of a tree is the base for the clever Alphabet poem written on its branches, “Q is for quart of beer at the bar” and “Z is for zoo where I stepped in the dung.”
But it’s Davidson’s paintings that provoke a response, and much like one of the gallery directors stated, “They’re not for everybody.” His ‘portraits’ might be inspired by Garbage Pail Kids, his everyday characters supplanted with gross features and exaggerated props. Mirror (Bad Cop) is a man with disgusting jowls, sucking on two straws that lead to a can tucked behind each ear. The peace signs on his lapels ironically fight through his double chin to be noticed. Davidson’s Mirror series (there’s also a politician and a smoker, among others) have a ‘crease’ drawn down the middle, as if the reflection was right to left, but the reflection seems to be our stereotyped prejudices — or at least what Davidson guesses they are. We have the fat cop too busy consuming to see anything in front of his mirrored glasses; the fat cat politician with pills on his tongue and horns in his ears. They’re frankly a little sad. Sometimes a self-deprecating reflection of society isn’t helpful or artistic, it’s just kind of depressing, and Davidson’s trying to bring whatever bitter views I may have to a degree I’m not comfortable with beyond a little juvenile humor.
