Alana Ross and Brent Becker in MIXED

I N R E V I E W

ALLANA ROSS AND BRENT BECKER IN:

MIXED

DONALD D. SHOOK GALLERY, ST. CHARLES COMMUNITY COLLEGE

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 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?

Allana Ross, Untitled (Woman’s Day 1969), (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

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, causing thoughts of protestors marching in cold streets for women’s rights to scroll through my mind. A smaller shape of green in a layer over the pink hand and arm looks like a small cloud made up of a cluster of hexagonal plant cells. Meanwhile, my friend sees a cat and a wadded up piece of paper. Another looks like a fish with its mouth open, trying to gobble up a little bite of something. The artist has thoroughly abstracted the source material into fields of gentle colors and pleasant abstract shapes.

Brent Becker, Gestalt Mouse, (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

The cloud-like quality of the artwork is enhanced by the artist’s layering of halftransparent white sheets over opaque ones, hanging together on a wooden rod with string like a kite or a banner. The cotton-like impression of the white mulberry paper makes the artworks especially soft and ephrmeral. Ross gave each the name Untitled to remove her ideas from the images, and then put only the name of the magazine in which she found her source material in parenthesis along with its year of publication. Yet, the magazine titles cue the viewer’s interpretation of the images, giving meaning removed with the “Untitled”.

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Brent Becker, Defense Mechanism, (photo credit: Katryn Dierksen)

-Katryn Dierksen

IN REVIEW WINTER 2018/19 ALLTHEARTSTL.COM