Lots can be said about all this year has taught us, not the least of which is to question nostalgia. Facts get constructed, memory fails/omits/alters/anesthetizes, and retrospect often brings with it an air of superiority and/or sophistication that renders the referent infantilized, simple or otherwise, “innocent.” But in some cases, such as Stephen Grebinski’s Room Service Plus, nostalgia can also be completely alluring, especially when it is deconstructed and/or rearranged to such an extent that that thing one is looking back upon becomes something new, in its own right. This 72 page book is a series of lo-fi collage work derived from VHS tapes found in a fire-damaged bath house. Porn, travel docs, cowboy movies, etc, are collected, combined, and otherwise altered to make up a series of images that locate and relocate the viewers gaze, alongside questions of subjectivity and authorship, panning between deeply layered bodies, landscapes and domestic scenes. The bodies themselves, sometimes de-nuded and anonymous, suggest levels of intimacy while never actually realizing their original pornography. The effect is that of a dream state where the viewer moves with the images as if between the rooms of a dream never fully grasping more than slippery suggestions or solicitations that dissipate just as quickly as they come on. At times those dream rooms take on the quality of a road trip, a shimmery and promiscuous one at that, where the camera, the viewer and the viewed are all constantly in motion, barely taking note of flickering trees, mountains, buildings, bodies as they pass us by. —Review by Rebecca Stoddard
