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Friday, February 26, 2010
Beyond Hallmark
By Harmony Hammond
For the Journal
February is the time of year that spawns exhibitions of red and pink heart-shaped art objects celebrating romance and love. "Heart This! Fourteen Artists Take on Valentine's Day," co-curated by David Solomon and Chee Ho, currently at Jay Etkin Gallery is not one of those shows — as the work intentionally twists and subverts the Hallmark holiday and its representations.
Solomon is the independent curator and innovative spirit of BANG, a kind of phantom gallery that materializes every couple of months at a different venue around town. Usually BANG presents an interesting theme-based show of work by underrepresented local artists. Frequently the exhibit is also a fundraiser for a non-art, not-for-profit community organizations. In this case, the exhibition is meant to draw attention to and generate support for the Esperanza Shelter for Battered Families.
According to artist Victoria Carlson, what we know as Valentine's Day has a history dating back to Lupercalia, the Roman festival of purification and fertility. In medieval times, Seynt Valentynes Day was believed to be the day birds chose their mates, ... so humans presumably followed suit. In any case, in numerous cultures, as Carlson reports: "... there seems to be a lot of mating and purifying and fertility centered around Feb. 14-15."
Drawing on this history, Carlson brings her skewed humor to near-mural scale proportions. "Saynt Valentynes Day," a large landscape painting on paper illustrating what looks like a bi-gendered St. Valentine and the birth of cupid amidst a field of wind-harvesting turbines, and mating inter-species swans, is surreal to say the least.
A second work, "Juno Fenruata," (named after a minor Roman deity who presided over Lupercalia,) is a life-sized cutout of a heavily tattooed nude woman in red high heels with movable appendages (phallus included — a sly reference to Lynda Benglis' famous Art Forum piece from the '70s where she posed nude sporting a large dildo. Most of the tattoo imagery is lifted from pornographic Japanese prints — explicit depictions of heterosexual and homosexual acts intertwined with skulls and snakes. Flocked pink and fuzzy, Juno is a hermaphrodite sex doll to be manipulated as one desires.
Hearts, cupids and arrows are reinterpreted. Colette Hosmer's three anatomically correct, wind-up hydrostone pig heart music boxes play "Love Me Tender" and "My Funny Valentine." Tim Jag's colorful frozen hearts, hung from the ceiling at the opening melted into a water trough below. They now lie in the snow in front of the gallery — literally left out in the cold.
Hallmark texts such as "Be My Valentine," "I Love You" and "Be Mine" are replaced with words less saccharine. Sweet Tarts, bronze casts of candy hearts by Chris Collins and Jennifer Joseph, are printed with a new vocabulary: wet, nasty, push, etc. A school of porcelain sperm, each imprinted with the imperative "grow!" are attached to Christy Hengst's milky white and yellow pigment and wax painting.
Noah Fisher is represented by three delicate drawings of cupid shooting arrows into various bodies. Each arrow has a text-ribbon attached reading: betrayed, scorned, rejected, wounded, destroyed, dumped or forgotten. In Michael Namingha's striking inkjet on canvas, the words "You Kicked Me in My Heart" are vertically stacked in a red field a la Barbara Kruger, Edgar-Heap-of-Birds, and a slew of other text-based artists — suggesting a theme of abusive relationships.
Tête de Veau, the creative and often performative collective of Yon Hudson, Ann Jag and Tuscany Wenger, works with found and recycled materials refashioned into "art objects" and "restyled couture garments." "Love is a Battlefield" is a black unisex mannequin outfitted in a camouflage patterned hat and convertible shorts ensemble, accessorized with furry elbow and knee pads, and synthetic chest hair, armed with phallic weapons of lust and a stuffed voodoo doll — ready to do battle "In the Name of Love."
In "Tangled Hearts" Susanna Carlisle and Bruce Hamilton embed video in an old opened suitcase standing on end. One side of the interior is a mirror — on the other side, dark red velvet folds surround the video of a nude woman crouched under a red cloth heart on top of a larger white cloth heart. Her back is to us. She begins to move and wiggle out from under the red cloth. The shape — both emerging butt and head of a penis — is humorous. Slowly the woman turns and twists — responding to the frame of velvet, seemingly held captive in the compressed space beneath the monitor's surface, as if she lives in the suitcase. As the dancer moves and the fabrics tangle, the video tracks the movement and shifts between figuration and abstraction — creating what looks like rich clots or stains of blood freed from the figure.
Works by Sydney Cooper, Scot Furgason, Chace Haynes, Ali Silverstein, Pete Sprunt and Tuscany Wenger round out "the show." This is a lively exhibition benefiting a good cause. All sales are split three ways: artist, Esperanza and Etkin Gallery. Check it out.
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