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A CULTURE OF ADDICTION

"Pharmacopia" is a large, spectacularly colorful installation by Andy
Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth. Part of the group show "Sex, Drugs, Rock n
Roll" at Gescheidle, it reflects on our obsession with drugs, both
legal and illegal, and puts that obsession in terms of a crazed,
overheated postmodern sensibility. A large chandelier made of
hypodermic needles studded with beads hangs from the ceiling,
sparkling but also menacing.

A medicine cabinet has apparently crashed to the floor, where it's
surrounded by mirror shards, and artificial flowers festoon a toilet
and the walls, as if plants have taken root in an abandoned bathroom.
"We're not trying to say any drug is wrong, just help people arrive
at their own conclusion," Roth says. She's suffered from migraines
since her youth and attributes her stomach problems to taking too
much ibuprofen and aspirin.

She became fascinated with chandeliers after seeing a particularly
gaudy one in a shop: "It was so over-the-top it made the object cool
again for me. The excessive sparkliness of the chandelier we built
reminded me of rock-star drug culture.'

A couple for the last three years, Roth and Diaz Hope collaborated on
every element of "Pharmaocpia", though Roth says she did more of the
"intricate" work. Both grew up in the Bay Area, and they live in San
Francisco now. As a child Diaz Hope took apart the old mainframe
computers his physicist grandfather brought home, and later he made
contraptions like an electromagnetic pendulum that, if swung high
enough, caused a frog's eyes to light up. In 1972, when he was five,
his geologist father quit his job and left his wife and two sons; in
his mind, society was on the verge of an apocalyptic meltdown.

Today his dad lives in Nevada, in a stone house he built himself,
with no electricity or phone. "He terraced the hillside and grows all
his food and stores it in a big root cellar he chipped out of the
mountainside that he keeps cool with spring water," Diaz Hope says.
"He doesn't trust society very much."

Diaz Hope himself is skeptical about technology but hopes to make it
more humane.

As an under-grad at Stanford he studied product design, engineering,
and fine art: "I was the kid with the dyed Mohawk who didn't fit in
with the physicists too well." His thesis project was designed for
terminally ill children: a tricycle with an IV pump, so they could
ride without a nurse to help them. In grad school at Stanford he
explored ways to improve office-cubicle environments, experimenting
with scents and subtle breezes. A few years after getting his MS he
started a furniture design business, and one of the objects he built
was a TV cabinet for people who were "addicted" to television: a
screen in front of the TV turned whatever image was on it into nine
abstract circles.

He had a corporate design job from 1998 to 2004, and among other
things designed a video display for an elevator in a New York hotel
that would track up and down objects at a rate proportional to the
elevator's speed.

The objects the hotel chose were giant nudes.

Diaz Hope has been doing his own art since college but rarely
exhibited until the last year, after he quit his corporate job; three
other pieces in this show are his along. "Study in Pink" is from a
series of "pill portraits": he places rolled-up cutout photographs of
the subject inside pill capsules and arranges them to create a
likeness of the person.

The pointillist image that results suggests the way identity is
filtered through drugs. "I think almost everybody has a debate over
whether they are in control of their drug use or it's controlling
them," he says, "from whether or not to take vitamins for some to how
many times it's OK to do speed in a single weekend for others."