In the obituary it describes all those he left behind. There are just his twins. They are the only living heirs to their late father’s estate. They’ve always been one another’s shadow.
One has a lust for life. One wholeheartedly resents their very existence. In readying the estate for its liquidation of assets one can’t bear to let go of anything. They idealize him in his absence. They love that story as much as they loved him. The other reduces him to the mistreatment they both suffered in his care and in the home. Only an entirely bad faith memory remained.
The aggrieved twin began having suddenly vivid dreams after he passed, such that they’d wake five or six times each night. In those instances of passing between states of consciousness what was remembered and what was invented became blurred. A staircase in their childhood home, which seemed unclear if it had, in fact, been there, bedevilled many such dreams. Each step taken was colored by paradox, seeping conflicting notions of security and menace, growth and regression, in that dreamlike way of feeling. As assuredly as you trusted a step to bear weight did such sentiments emanate from it. On the first day spent going through his things in the home they reached the same staircase which must have informed the visions.
The two discovered pictures he had made on the backs of the storage boards of some of his vast comic book collection. No one would have ever seen these but him. They didn’t even realize he must have liked to make pictures. The pictures seemed like a journal, some altogether private space. The imagery was widely varied yet revolved around one central subject. They both eventually agreed to display these items, decorating the estate sale and separating from it. It was about all they could easily agree on in relation to the estate.
What was left behind becomes us. What was collected, the impacts of behaviors. A spectral afterimage.
Michael Bussell chose Gengar, an iconic ghost Pokémon, to become his subject five years ago. He has rendered Gengar hundreds of times since, deforming and reconfiguring the symbol in his exploratory pictures and sculptures.
Gengar derives its name from the ‘doppelgänger,’ a ghostly double of a living person.
This aspect of Gengar is at the center of Bussell’s presentation at Cowpine Theater. Here Gengar is diffuse, rendered with wavering edges and pink-to-purple colors that transmute like neochrome. In some pictures he appears to us as a spectral cloud, in a state between forms. In pictures where he is more concrete, with discrete edges, he occupies liminal spaces. He is seen posted on a ladder or shifting across a staircase – transient zones that entail ascent or descent.
Where is Gengar going, and what forms will he acquire?
Michael Bussell received a BFA in Photography from Maryland Institute College of Art. His output has been exhibited internationally over the past decade, including in solo exhibitions at Plague Space, Krasnodar, RU (2022), Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2015) and group shows at Marvin Gardens, Brooklyn, NY (2024), Triest, Brooklyn, NY (2021), New Scenario, Pripyat, UA and online (2021) and Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2019). In 2016 he founded the curatorial platform Wild Flower which situates art in Baltimore’s Leakin Park for dissemination online. It has also co-produced the projects Vent Space (2020-2021), My New Bed (2019) and Escape Room (2024).