“Andy Coolquitt: …i need a hole in my head,” MCASB Satellite
Photographs by Carly Otness
In luminous, prismatic color, Austin-based artist Andy Coolquitt juxtaposes clean-lined design with a hairy, yarny, ludic sense of assemblage. Coolquitt’s site-specific installation at MCASB’s Satellite, Hotel Indigo, curated by Brooke Kellaway, plays high and low keys that humor and provoke curiosity.
Flying porcelain spheres invade the boutique hotel’s chic main lobby. Alongside the front desk, the soft framing of a hoodie anchors a synthetic wig and a topsy turvy plastic chair. It’s a playful “hello.”
The hotel is brimming with these kinds of artistic wisecracks. Working with materials sourced from thrift stores, Coolquitt has created a compendium of aesthetically pleasing but somehow confusing/uncomfortable composites.
Elegant lines of light sculptures hang above a diagonal of crestfallen clothes. From a distance, stuffed nylon balls on canvas read as geometric abstraction; up close, they look like knotty potatoes.
Plush toilet seat-covers and mats emerge in a variety of functions throughout the lush destination hotel—covering the imagined private parts of three mannequins on the second floor; orbiting patrons on the stairwell walls; arranged on a canvas to spell out “CAA CAA.”
The exhibit has boldly altered the common spaces of the hotel—painted walls, a curated reading nook, gazing mannequins in the atrium. While some of the works on paper are framed and hung conventionally, this hotel art is not decorative. It’s active, a conversation starter’s aphrodisiac.
Coolquitt’s eye-catching installation is a sophisticated theater, evoking a culture of consumer waste, illusions and unsatisfied pursuits of pleasure.
“Andy Coolquitt: …i need a hole in my head” is on exhibit from May 18, 2018 to March 7, 2021 at MCASB Satellite, Hotel Indigo, 121 State St., Santa Barbara
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