Performance Anxiety

Painting, Sculpture, and Film

David Bayus

September 14th - November 9th, 2024

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 14th, 2024, 6:00 - 9:00 pm
Closing Reception: Saturday, November 9th, 2025, 1:00 - 3:00 pm

Featuring a new animated film, which tells a playful personal story of insecurity, anger, and the difficulties in love, while speaking to generational changes in romantic relationships, the politics of domestic labor, and contemporary uncertainties about the role of men in a post-feminist world.

David Bayus, *Performance Anxiety*, 2024, video still

In his artwork, David Bayus consistently addresses crises and the ways they shape our lives and social organizations. Whereas previously he has done so on a macroscopic scale, through science fiction fantasies of global pandemics and the end of the universe, in his most recent animated film, Performance Anxiety, Bayus presents a psychological crisis in the private, domestic context of a romantic partnership. Specifically, he playfully paints the portrait of a married man, who suffers a crisis of confidence in the wake of a fight with his wife and descends into paranoid fantasies of her infidelity with another menacing man.

The film is composed, uniquely, in the style of movies from the 1940’s and 1950’s, with Art Deco sets and song and dance numbers. One scene re-stages Patti Page’s performance of the song, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” while another employs motion-capture data extracted from a Gene Kelly tap dance routine. The film is also decidedly surreal, depicting a haunting, almost nightmarish dreamscape, vaguely reminiscent of David Lynch. Through the ordeal of his dreaming, the protagonist both indulges his paranoid fantasies of humiliation and revenge, while also working through the conflicts that plague him, and rediscovering his lover as a supportive ally and companion.

Along with telling a personal story of insecurity, anger, and the difficulties in love, the film speaks to generational changes in romantic relationships, the politics of domestic labor, and contemporary uncertainties about the role of men in a post-feminist world. In conjunction with the film, the exhibition includes a new painting and a new sculpture that speak to similar themes.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

David Bayus (b. 1982, Johnson City, TN) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. His work is a cross-disciplinary practice centered around experimental filmmaking with a focus on the increasingly convergent relationships between spirituality, technology, and crisis. He is a co-founder of BASEMENT art collective located in San Francisco's Mission District. He received his MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. He has exhibited widely in the Bay Area and abroad, including the 2018 edition of Bay Area Now at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His work can be found in the collections of the San Francisco Arts Commission; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Images from the Film