Brides of Frankenstein continues...
Addressing the technology and imagery of video games, more and more a kind of surrogate reality for many in our culture, are Peggy Ahwesh and Kristin Lucas. Ahwesh's strangely compelling She Puppet repositions Lara Croft from the Tomb Raider game into a new, introspective video identity. Kristin Lucas's 5 Minute Break also mines the territory staked out by Lara; Lucas also presents Involuntary Reception, a split-screen video featuring the artist as a quirky character unusually sensitive to high-frequency waves. For those feeling stressed by all of this, Adrienne Wortzel's Eliza Redux: The Veils of Transference offers five minute interactive digital therapy sessions with "Eliza," a robotic virtual Freudian psychoanalyst.
Heidi Kumao and Patricia Piccinini create menacing, yet humorous, animated, robotic sculptures. Kumao's Protest uses little girls' black patent leather tap shoes and mechanical legs to create an interactive work which stamps on the table in a moving, robotic tantrum. This work, defying "proper" behavior, is quite popular with adults and children alike, who revel in its loud, insistent clatter. Nearby, we may find animatronic sculptures of silicone, hog-hair and automotive components—Patricia Piccinini's Siren Moles. Picinnini also presents In Bocca Al Lupo (In the Mouth of the Wolf) a video which features an eerie, flaccid display of biomorphic hanging objects, which go from a relatively calm state to irate and agitated. They vaguely suggest the half-formed head of Voldemort as embedded in the skull of Professor Quirrell.
Video facilitates works by Gail Wight and Camille Utterbach which use living beings in a more abstract way, as color, weight and form, Utterbach's clever Shaken, From the Potent Objects Series, offers a snow globe; inside, a small LCD screen displays a woman who responds as if she, herself, were being shaken. Her engaging Untitled 5, From the External Measures Series allows the viewer to interact with a large computer-generated projection of a colorful abstract drawing—as we cross the space, our bodies create lines and strokes. In the adjacent space, Stanford professor Gail Wight presents a beautiful, subtle video triptych, Creep which records the growth of a particular variety of slime mold; its straightforward approach finds the mysterious side of a rather unglamorous living organism.
Patricia Piccinini, "Bodyguard",
silicon, animal fur, acrylic, resin, leather, timer DVD
59” x 30” x 24”, 2003-04
Helping to set the mood of Gothic horror, a "study" is created, with desk, oriental carpet and flickering electric candelabras. Much of the work on view reads more as science fiction than horror, still some works do cross over the line—Tamara Stone's Ouch, a hanging installation of life-sized "pre-pubescent dolls," with gauzy, shroud-like garments, and ropey tufts of wool hair. If you are so compelled, you may walk through these corpse-like constructions. Also presenting macabre imagery, Erzsébet Baerveldt's Pieta takes the image of the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of Jesus Christ as a point of departure for a video piece in which the artist, assuming the role of grieving creator, unshrouds a female figure made of wet clay. She gently and rather tenderly pries it from its plastic drape, as a solemn soundtrack, taken from Warhol's "Dracula," creates a creepy, somewhat funereal mood.
We may also view large, still digital photos by Sabrina Raaf which offer unusual and disturbing images of alternate realities where people defy gravity, exist with symbiotic insects, or find they share a bathroom with a band of mini-astronauts, and Amy Myers's futuristic graphite, ink and gouache drawing which suggests a blueprint for some austere android.
Many of us respond, at one time or another, to a creative impulse. We feel the need to shape objects and/or living creatures, which will bear our stamp when we no longer have life or breath. For centuries, this creative impulse was, for women, largely confined to the areas of procreation and mothering. As women have evolved, along with the rest of our species, to demand a different set of variables for our lives, many of us ponder the infinite permutations possible. Brides of Frankenstein offers a deliciously chilling glimpse into seductive options for giving life to inanimate objects.
For more information on Brides of Frankenstein visit San Jose Museum of Art.
