Friday, June 05, 2009
Cute But Creepy
By Kim Russo
Of the Albuquerque Journal
Walking into POP Gallery on Water Street is like walking into a nightmare, complete with grimacing, big-headed children, evil stuffed toys, and super-creepy (half-animal, half-human) monsters. Problem is, it's all really pretty. REALLY pretty. So pretty it gives you the shivers.
For the second year in a row, POP Gallery is exhibiting the paintings and sculptures of female pop surrealist artists in an annual show called “POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange”. And that title just about sums it up.
Also known as lowbrow art, pop surrealism is an art movement that started in the '60s with the hot rod culture but really didn't take hold in the capital “A” art world until about 10 years ago. Inspired by comic book art, tattoo art, punk culture, and street art, pop surrealist artists often make images and objects that look commercial, toy-like, and cartoony. Which is why the capital “A” art world tends to give the movement only slight recognition (the first comprehensive scholarly text on pop surrealism, “Pop Surrealism: The Rise Of Underground Art”, edited by Kirsten Anderson, came out just five years ago).
The fact is that artists have been questioning the distinction between highbrow art and lowbrow art for a long time, starting with Duchamp in the beginning of the 20th century, and continuing through the present day. This is, by now, a worn-out discussion. Still, some viewers might walk into POP Gallery and find that the characters in the paintings aren't much different from the Bratz or PowerPuff Girls (just a whole lot creepier).
Funny how we hold on so strongly to what we think art should look like, and it shouldn't look like something you'd find on the shelf at Target or the Nickelodeon store. We want the boundaries among things to be nice and thick. Pop surrealists show us that the distinction between art and popular culture, art and design, and art and commerce can get really, really fuzzy, and that is really, really interesting. You can either enjoy the way these artists play with those boundaries, or you can give them the cold shoulder and head over to Charlotte Jackson Gallery for some cool minimalism.
It's true that some of the work in “POP Femme Sugar Coated Strange” is overly romantic, cutesy and just silly. The worst work in the show lacks the irony that this sort of thing depends on to keep it from becoming just another hip-retro version of those big-eyed girl prints by Eden, Maio, Goji and Keane, the ones many of us had in our bedrooms in the 1960s. (The famous Keane images were made by Margaret Keane, not Walter Keane, her husband, who took all the credit for years and whom she finally and thankfully divorced. Margaret Keane's paintings were pretty darn autobiographical in that self-pitying way, teardrops and all).
The best works in this show do something a bit more complicated, a bit more intelligent, than just showing us sad, doe-eyed girls in unfortunate circumstances.
Kathie Olivas' “Misery Children” have the most in common with the Keane girls, but the intention is quite different. In her artist's statement Olivas writes, “[This] series focuses on the constant social desire to assign “cuteness.” This often serves as a means to make something innocent and more appealing, therefore, nonthreatening. … The characters are meant to … [reflect] isolation, fear, and an uncertainty; yet, at the same time they serve as empowered alter egos.” In “Regenerate,” a big-headed, red-headed girl rolls her eyes back in her head and grimaces. She is sitting on a pile of dead rabbits whose eyes are X's. She has octopus legs. One of the live rabbits is holding a lollipop and looking at her with a toothy smile. This rabbit, and the girl, are both wearing birthday hats. Nightmare, yes?
Olivas' images are beautifully painted, and she has an exquisite sense of color. So even though you want to run away from this nightmare, you keep looking, and looking, and looking …
Same is true of Carrie Ann Baade's work. Baade's paintings are a cacophony of nearly trompe l'oeil elements so dense it is a true mark of her skill that nothing about her imagery is chaotic. Inspired by literature and art history, Baade's paintings are strangely familiar, the way that situations in dreams can be. That's because she borrows imagery from historical paintings –– an angel from someone like Giotto, for example.
She works first on collages made of her own photographs and reproductions from art history. “With a flare of Dr. Frankenstein” as she puts it, she creates strange images, usually with a central female figure. Around this figure swirls activity: ladybugs have sex, frogs congregate, a fly licks up a drop of something gooey. Baade visually cuts a horizontal rectangle from the section of the face over and including the eyes of the figure and visually blows that section up a bit. It exaggerates the eyes and the emotion, but it's unnecessarily gimmicky. She doesn't need to be so tricky; she a beautiful painter, and beautiful painting is rare.
There is much more in this show, such as the collaborative works of the sister team Miss Mindy and CJ Metzger, whose grandmother worked as a painter at Disney in the 1930s (other family members were illustrators, puppeteers, and mask makers). Miss Mindy works on the animated series “Mighty B!” on Nickelodeon, and Metzger, in addition to making art, is also an accomplished character developer and graphic designer. Theirs is the most blatantly commercial work in the exhibition. Santa Fean Marie Sena's work is also worth checking out. Her tattoo-inspired works fall somewhere between illustration and painting, tattoo design and medical illustration. Like all of the art in this show, Sena's luscious watercolor paintings, which are coated in resin, would succeed in many different venues: reproduced on a T-shirt for KidRobot in New York, as a decoration in a cool retro-shop, as a design option in a tattoo parlor, or as capital “A” art on the walls of any contemporary gallery. That's kinda cool. |
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