On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was killed by a gunshot to the neck the same day that a student in Evergreen, Colorado—just outside of Denver—walked into a high school and shot multiple students before shooting themselves. This, the day before the 24th anniversary of 9/11, made for a potent environment in which to enter Living Arts’ latest double exhibition: Val Esparza’s “STATE OF THE UNION” and Austin Gober’s “Dinkum Hokum.” Both exhibitions have plenty to say to our current moment in American history, and they do so quite successfully.
In Austin Gober’s “Dinkum Hokum,” a host of ordinary objects are disrupted and torn into shreds. Gober, a BFA grad from the Kansas City Art Institute, has a style that could be described as “MS Paint on LSD,” wherein bold, sharp, recognizable lines run over, through, and around melting, pixelated grotesques that stand in for figures.
Gober is no realist, though in “Dissociating in the Living Room,” he proves that he could be. In that acrylic, a green chair is vivisected into three quadrants, each smaller than the other, until a tiny piece remains in the center. Gober’s balancing act of verisimilitude and abstraction is at its most perfect here. Modernity’s collapse of meaning finds a physical avatar in this chair, whose reality is pushed inward until it splits.
Instead of using realism, with its pitfalls of ease and specificity, Gober reaches for the feelings of things, the disturbances inherent in matter. In “The Same Cat Twice While Hating the President,” cats are burst open into recognizable yet disturbingly blown-out ultraviolet renderings; in “Deb,” a series of black and white bars stands in for the features of a woman’s face—even with this constraint, Gober is able to make her age and aspect clear and recognizable.