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Oolong Gallery is thrilled to announce the inaugural exhibition at its new Rancho Santa Fe, CA location, absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, a two-person show featuring sculptures and works on paper by Naomi Nadreau and Hiroshi McDonald. The exhibition runs from September 20 to October 12, with an opening reception on Friday, September 20, from 6-9 PM.
The exhibition’s title, absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, refers to a concept borrowed from French theorist Guy Debord, whose seminal work The Society of the Spectacle (1967) critiqued the commodification of everyday life and the alienation caused by a culture of spectacle. In Debord’s terms, society is organized around appearances and images, ultimately detaching individuals from authentic experiences. Nadreau and McDonald take this notion and reframe it—exploring not only how reality is distorted by spectacle but also the potential for self-discovery and transformation within it. Rather than simply critiquing alienation, they offer moments of fulfillment, where the spectacle becomes a site for creative and personal metamorphosis. Through the powerful convergence of McDonald and Nadreau’s works, the exhibition blurs the boundary between what is seen and what is felt, challenging our perceptions of identity, form, and reality itself.
Naomi Nadreau’s practice draws from science fiction, particularly its ability to destabilize narratives and reality, allowing her to explore the “in-between.” As she states in her essay Distorting Boundaries, her work embraces “estrangement, irreality, and transformation,” creating objects that transcend their materiality. Through sculptures that evoke futuristic landscapes and biomorphic forms, Nadreau’s pieces offer a visual and tactile exploration of what lies beyond the immediate, collapsing the boundaries between the grotesque and the beautiful. Her practice, much like Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory, shifts focus away from the hero and the violent spectacle, centering instead on inner transformation, ambiguity, and healing.
Nadreau’s writing on her ceramic flower pieces, especially in A Love for Obliteration, reflects a fascination with the transformative beauty of destruction. She describes her process of dipping flowers in clay slip, firing them, and turning them into ash, leaving behind the ceramic exterior as a shell or urn. The interior holds the impression of the flowers, a haunting reminder of their existence and obliteration. She calls it a ‘love for obliteration’ because she finds the process apocalyptic yet beautiful, seeing the destruction as transformative.
Her Future Flowers to Give are inspired by the crystallized plants she killed, symbolizing a collection of dead forms transformed into new ceramic works. These flowers, often found discarded or given as gifts, are meant to transcend their original state, becoming otherworldly flora that still connect to our reality. Nadreau envisions a world where these ceramic flowers blend with the landscape, embodying a sense of life and death simultaneously. This duality, of transformation and preservation, is central to her art.
Nadreau’s use of traditional and alternative mold-making techniques explores the relationship between positive and negative space. She is drawn to the idea of creating vessels—forms that hold and contain, much like the body holds the heart and soul. These vessels, however, are not merely utilitarian objects; they are deeply influenced by science fiction, not for its narratives but for its transformative landscapes and objects. She finds inspiration in the overlooked elements of science fiction, focusing on how objects and landscapes are changed through their journeys.
Hiroshi McDonald, meanwhile, presents an ongoing inquiry into framing and subjectivity. His approach to materials, chemistry, and force resonates with William Blake’s visionary themes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where boundaries between opposing states blur, giving rise to new forms of understanding. McDonald challenges the notion of inside versus outside, questioning the frames we construct around identity, nationality, gender, and class. His sculptural works, rooted in both old craftsmanship and modern improvisation, defy static forms.
McDonald investigates the concept of destruction as transformation, drawing parallels between the ephemeral nature of life and the process of creation. His rock and plaster sculptures resemble fossilized remnants, fusing natural elements with synthetic processes to create otherworldly objects—suggesting a delicate balance between preservation and erasure. Informed by Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, McDonald’s work reflects a deep contemplation of what is inside and outside, both literally and figuratively.
Much like William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), which challenges conventional binaries of good and evil, the works in this exhibition engage with dualities—interior and exterior, human and alien, destruction and creation—to blur the lines between them. McDonald’s modular, transformative sculptures mirror Blake’s exploration of visionary oppositions, while Nadreau’s science fiction-inspired aesthetics emphasize the multiplicity of realities and futures.
Together, Nadreau and McDonald bring to life Debord’s observation of the spectacle’s seductive power, yet they also offer viewers a path beyond the surface—towards introspection, transformation, and a critical understanding of the constructs we often take for granted. As the gallery’s inaugural Rancho Santa Fe, CA exhibition, absolute fulfillment in the spectacle invites attendees to question their relationship to both the art and the world around them, embracing change and ambiguity as pathways to new understandings.
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