IN REVIEW
ALLANA ROSS AND BRENT BECKER IN:
MIXED The exhibition featured artwork by Bruce Alves, Brent Becker, Joe Chesla, Tim Hahn, Ruth Kolker, Amy Reidel, Allana Ross, Kathie Thomas, and Timothy Wagner. Many of these works shared an abstract sense of form and bright colors that impress thoughts of the fantastic Gestalt Mouse, a mixed media painting and drawing by Brent Becker, has a cartoonish body that first looks like it is entirely composed
DONALD D. SHOOK GALLERY, ST. CHARLES COMMUNITY COLLEGE of exposed tendons and intestines, decaying in an earthen environment. On closer examination the viewer realizes that the mouse’s whole body is actually pieces of other dead animals stitched heavily into the form of a mouse. In particular, the artist has chosen to use the heads of other animals as the pieces of the mouse’s body. The Gestalt Mouse has a pig face and bat face that together make a crotch, rabbit and snakes heads for a nose, a turkey for a foot, and so on.
People often find the idea of a mouse to be disgusting. A mouse signifies contamination. Gestalt: “something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts. (Merriam-Webster)” Has Baker then supposed that a mouse is the sum of a lot of other dead animals? Is this a grotesque rendering of the concept of reincarnation consolidated in one body? Is this a contemporary American Frankenstein’s monster, perhaps saying something about the horrors of factory farming? The picture is reminiscent of Winnie the Pooh, or some other fairytale illustration, insinuating an allegorical interpretation. The color fades and drips, so that the artwork looks waterlogged, like it has been abandoned in a rain puddle or a gutter. Another piece of Becker’s work, Defense Mechanism, has a similar affect, with an even more heightened steam punk fable theme, this time featuring a wind-up toy of a pelican with a gas mask for a face and round mechanical wings folded roundly so that it looks like a leathery metal ball whereabouts its body. The scary dystopian bird uses a clamp for a foot to clutch a cute yellow duckling that drips blood into a pure blue ocean, its eyes scratched out in bloody X’s. Becker’s style evokes childlike fantasy in the realm of terror, like scary stories and images made for children by the likes of Tim Burton and Roald Dahl who knew that children could handle more truth than many creators give them. Untitled (Woman’s Day 1969) by Allana Ross is one of a series of screen prints on mulberry paper. Ross took clothing patterns and clippings from vintage magazines and isolated the patterns for different articles of clothing to print ambiguous, pleasing shapes onto soft white sheaves of thick paper. The prints relay a sense of nostalgia for lying in the grass and gazing up into the clouds, daydreaming, guessing and fantasizing about their Rorschach shapes. Each print consists of two fields of color that play on the viewer’s imagination like ink blots. The mere insinuation of a “woman’s day” primes me to see a hand with only the middle finger flicking out connected to an arm in a warm sweater,
Allana Ross, Untitled (Woman’s Day 1969), (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen) 09 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM WINTER 2018/19
IN REVIEW
