Robots have been beeping and whirring away in our imaginations for a long time. There’ve been representations of androids and mechanical men in movies for over a century. It’s almost certain that your childhood was full of robots: the droids of Star Wars, WALL-E, the Jetsons, Optimus Prime, the cast of Futurama. Gamers battle robots in first-person shooters and befriend them in point-and-click adventures. An animate servant meant to suggest the future now belongs to the nostalgic past. To a child, a robot is a character like any other, albeit one with shiny metallic properties that don’t belong to its fleshier neighbors. Grownups don’t tend to think of robots at all.
Well, most of them don’t. Chris RWK is an exception. The painter, muralist, and sculptor has made the robot — one robot in particular — the protagonist of his work in aerosol and acrylic. His rectangular-headed, slightly sheepish, and reliably adorable robot appears in almost all of the works in “Unburdened,” an exhibition of new work on view at Deep Space Gallery (77 Cornelison St.) this weekend. Chris RWK’s character does not merely draw on distant memories of games and cartoons. Though it’s never spelled out on the canvases, this robot is, for all intents and purposes, a youth.
The robot’s innocence is apparent even in paintings in which he’s dressed like an adult. In “Never Miss Your Mark,” he’s got the suit and tie of a salaryman but the posture of a chastened kid. The mechanical man stands with his shoulders hunched and his head tilled forward, and, in a gesture that’s as emo as Jimmy Eat World, he holds his arrow-pierced heart in his delicate bent-iron fingers. (Robots, it seems, can extract and carry their tickers for dramatic effect without losing functionality, which certainly gives them practical advantages over their human neighbors.) He could be trudging back home from work, but he’s waist deep in a field of aerosol flowers that resemble lollipops.
Chris RWK might be the best known of the street artists who’ve enlivened our local streetscape. He is inarguably the most sentimental. With their steel sleeves unavailable for adornment, his robots wear their hearts in their chest cavities instead. In “To the North,” a painting done on a Route 34 street sign, a stream of symbols of affection pour from the torso of a besotted droid. He’s frosted one of the floating hearts with white paint to make it look like it’s catching the reflection of the headlights of an oncoming truck. This little guy is standing in the middle of the road with his heart wide open. He may get flattened by happenstance, but that’s not going to stop him from radiating love.
This conception of the android is far more Tin Man than Terminator, and it gets at what it is about robots that continues to appeal to the young and hopeful. We dig robots not because they are abject or incomprehensible but because we identify with them in the here and now. Like Chris RWK’s creations, we’ve reluctantly armored ourselves against the world we inhabit, but we’re desperate (well, some of us, anyway) to let our feelings show. We, like the robots, are often consigned to lives of drudgery, chained to desks or assembly lines or digital responsibilities, but even if we can’t always have physical autonomy, we can certainly express ourselves emotionally. Stand just right in the gallery at Deep Space, and a little bronze robot statue barely larger than a chibi doll will align with “Shine in the Dark,” a large canvas on which a robot steps from the shadows to offer the viewer a heart larger than his own head. It’s all part of the same tortured Valentine: a message from those with their guards up, and a hint that hard surfaces often protect sensitive souls.
In keeping with the purity of the message, Chris RWK keeps his lines thick and his color fields solid. Though he’s a firm hand with a spray paint can, he does not tend to go for the aerosol virtuosity of Mustart or the labyrinthine designs of Clarence Rich. Instead, his robotic character is rendered in a few bold strokes: a modest chassis that suggests the protagonist could stand to do a few more robot push-ups and a head that resembles a toaster stood on its side. Because one of the slash-like eyes is always longer than the other, it always looks like the robot is turning in the direction of the viewer. It’s funny how a simple visual gesture can create such a persuasive illusion, but teaching us to respect the power of small gestures is one of the artist’s missions.
Because of his affection for his character, Chris RWK can’t let him face the night alone. Light is usually falling on the robot’s body, suggesting that he’s running his programs in a wider world that extends far beyond the frame. “In the Stars” sanctifies the machine by bathing its body in a halo of golden aerosol. In many of these canvases, the android is joined by a little red bird with an oval eye that takes up most of its face; “I’ll Take All the Advice I Can Get” portrays three birds on the robot’s outstretched arm. Another alights on the robot’s head in “Never Alone.” It’s Woodstock on the roof of Snoopy’s doghouse, here to guide its friend through the anxiety that accompanies modern life. These birds can feel as emotionally manipulative as Disney sidekicks, but they’re pretty cute, and cuteness forgives plenty.
As downcast as he can be, the RWK robot is also irrepressible: he pops up in funny places, and when he does, he certainly isn’t shy. In “Unburdened,” he peers back at us from posters, subway maps, and objects liberated from the MTA. The artist emblazons him on spent aerosol cans, and there he simultaneously acts like a proof of street-art concept and a consumer brand. In many of the pieces in the show, he appears to be emerging from a flurry of funny pages from newspapers: in “My Blue Stays True,” he shares space with a representation of Donald Duck. At times he morphs — he can become a baby version of Batman, or a little Death with a skull in the place of the robot head. “Character Development” gives him a scythe, but also a branded sweatshirt and a corporate name tag that reads “I’m a Good Guy, I Swear.” Even the Grim Reaper, it turns out, has romantic leanings. May all our adversaries, mechanical, mythological, or otherwise, have such winning dispositions.