Monsters, Maps, and Marginalia

How is your balance these days? I’m asking only because I’m about to take you out on a limb–and who knows how many of us have learned to walk on a tightrope unafraid, arms spread wide; how to fall without getting hurt; and how to lift off and take flight? (Impossible, you say? But there is flight and flight, lines inevitably running together in a perspective unsuited for parallels and the blind leaps of the imagination, based on nothing but a hunch. I like following those inexplicable urges.) This particular limb is a story: a story that tries to make connections where maybe there are none to begin with. But, you see, I have this hunch. So let me see if I can spin this right and weave the strands together into what may, momentarily, resemble a whole.

The current McKnight show, on view at MCAD’s gallery, brings together four artists. At first glance, all that connects these artists is the fact that they received a grant that allowed them to pursue the pieces on display. But, as Kristin Makholm puts it in the catalog, these artists also share an interest in "allegory, narrative, symbolism, and story." How appropriate, then, to create a story of my own–not a linear story, but one that proceeds in a seemingly counterintuitive way: from the margin to the center, from the periphery to that elusive pivotal point of convergence.

As many advocates of such a shift in perspective have argued, what may result from such daring turn-abouts ranges from acute vertigo to a more general unease, anger even, unleashed by the sense of uncertainty and of a profound estrangement from what we thought was ordinary–too ordinary and plainly "normal" to pay much attention to. But looking from the margins toward the center re-arranges what we can see. What’s more, it can lastingly impact how we see, and make us aware of where it is that we see from–speaking socially, culturally, and, also, personally. This realization may jolt us into performing a double take. A triple take. Quadruple–? (Humor me, this once.)

Four artists, each of them accomplished: Andrea Carlson (whose The Tempest is the header image included above), Megan Vossler, Amy DiGennaro, and Stacey Davidson. Four women. In this election season, with the electorate newly attuned to the lingering legacies of racial and gender trouble, is this a remarkable fact? From what can be gleaned by looking over the list of past grant recipients, it seems this is indeed a first. Does that make four female recipients remarkable, though? I don’t know. What is remarkable, without question, is the work on display.

On opening night, Andrea Carlson, whose large scale mixed-media pieces entitled The Tempest (2008) and Portage (2008) occupy the gallery wall furthest from the entrance, mentioned in conversation (and I have her permission to repeat this exchange here) that her friends, upon seeing her new work, asked, "But where are the monsters?" Given Carlson’s previous interest in the mythical monster of Anishinaabe lore, the Windigo, this question is not as odd as it may initially seem. In her Windigo Cycle, inspired, as the artist notes, by her Anishinaabe and European ancestry, Carlson focuses on this "winter cannibal monster" as a character that indiscriminately consumes those unfortunate enough to cross its path. On American Folklore, Schlosser describes the Windigo as "tall as a tree, with a lipless mouth and jagged teeth. Its breath was a strange hiss, its footprints full of blood, and it ate any man, woman or child who ventured into its territory. And those were the lucky ones. Sometimes, the Windigo chose to possess a person instead, and then the luckless individual became a Windigo himself, hunting down those he had once loved and feasting upon their flesh." Carlson relies on the idea of indiscriminate, insatiable consumption, paired with the twin threats of being consumed spiritually–possessed– by the monster and, as a result, of turning to cannibalism, as a powerful metaphor in her exploration of cross-cultural exchanges, including assimilation and acculturation.

Lauren O’Neill-Butler, analyzing Carlson’s work in her catalog essay, ascribes a "sharp post-colonial critique" to the artist’s work. And, yes, the elements of a post-colonial critique are here: for instance, the very title–The Tempest–alludes to that staple of post-colonial literary analysis, Shakespeare’s comedy set on a wind-swept island, complete with monstrous and enslaved natives. And yet, applying the term "post-colonial" to Native American and U.S. American cultural relations is not uncontested: writers such as Jack D. Forbes (in Columbus and Other Cannibals) and Thomas King (in "Godzilla Vs. Post-Colonial") have argued, with admittedly controversial results, that, strictly speaking, there is no "post" to the colonization of Native land in North America.

The Tempest is aptly titled, then, to allude to these stormy cross-cultural interactions. Yet the literal storm does not rage at the center of the painting, where white clouds drift serenely over placid water. It is at the periphery, on the margins, where there is unrest, tumult even. Striking black and white geometric patterns, inspired by Anishinaabe blanket patterns, abandon the cozy appeal of the textile and morph into a threatening vortex, complete with rows of jagged teeth. The overlaid patterns evoke a disturbing sensation of motion, as if we are allowed only a brief glimpse of the peaceful vision of a fantastic landscape before the rotating, serrated edges will close on us.

The act of looking itself, it seems, becomes a dangerous, complicated endeavor here. Where exactly do we stand in relation to this work? Visually, we have to pass through the swirling, vertigo-inducing threshold in order to reach–what? The lure of an idyllic landscape? A promise of authenticity? Neither is ultimately allowed: the paintings themselves are divided into panels that rip the representational space apart and thus deny any illusion of reaching the sanctuary of the land beyond. There is no illusionary wholeness here. All we can see is our own fantasy, framed by the toothy geometry of indigenous imagination.

So, to return to the initial question raised vis-à-vis Carlson’s work: Where, then, are the monsters here? Who consumes whom in this collision of cultures? Who is at risk of involuntarily turning into the monster and suffering this drastic adjustment of vision through possession by the evil spirit? Given that Carlson’s two paintings are shown next to each other, the experience of looking at their geometrically framed landscapes assumes the uncanny air of peering through two giant eyeholes: There is a storm raging inside the skull we thus come to inhabit, and we, the onlookers, have little control over what we see, since our vision is at the mercy of swirling of peripheral patterns. We, the spectators, turn into the mythical monster. We are the cannibals, indiscriminately consuming whatever comes our way–art, nature, culture (whether our own or somebody else’s), resources. We consume it all, the high-brow along with the low-brow, no-brow. With a storm raging at the periphery of our vision, can we disting
uish omnivore from cannibal? Clearly, this work articulates a poignant cultural critique–whether it qualifies as post-colonial or not is another question, though.

Cultural critique, too, acts as a driving force in Megan Vossler‘s work. In her drawings, nameless people scavenge or migrate through rudimentary landscapes that coalesce out of the white paper expanses surrounding these furtive scenes. Vossler withholds any clues to the specific circumstances that may have caused the experience of her characters. These are not the people whose fate makes headlines. These are the survivors, occupying the margins of international media attention, left to fend for themselves. Their experiences move to the center of Vossler’s drawings but nonetheless remain curiously distant, fading in and out of the white space as if not quite in focus, as if caught in the midst of intense fog that only has lifted momentarily.

Eventually, the whiteness itself emerges as the most suggestive element of Vossler’s work. Whiteness is not just negative space here but seems to bear political meaning. This whiteness engulfs the scenes it surrounds. Like a temporarily suspended blind spot–a blind area, actually–it grants uneasy immunity to perceptive probing. It shields, it erases, it hides the particularities that may help amend the vertiginous vagueness of the scenes depicted. Thus, while Vossler’s work is clearly concerned with re-positioning marginalized and ignored experience at center stage, the seeping, creeping whiteness muffles the margins of the drawings with subtle menace.

The whiteness materializes in the plaster casts of duffel bags, backpacks, and plastic bags in If you find me, hide me, I don’t know where I’ve been, displayed centrally on the gallery floor. While ostensibly concerned with security regulations, as O’Neill-Butler notes in the catalog, I am, once again, intrigued by the sheer whiteness on display: Is this Peggy McIntosh’s famous invisible knapsack of white privilege literally becoming visible and even tangible at last? Do the privileges most white people have taken for granted for so long finally become recognizable as such at, ironically, the very point in time when they come under increasing attack? And who is uttering the title of the piece–that lost, paranoid, amnesiac phrase?

While Vossler leaves us guessing as to who the people in her drawings are, Amy DiGennaro‘s heavily personal imagery leaves little doubt about the artist’s familiarity with her subjects. Yet this focus on the personal never falls prey to the tired indulgence of self-absorbed work that thrives on narcissism and the audience’s voyeurism; the personal, here, serves a purpose.

Inspired by the marginalia of medieval books, DiGennaro’s drawings offer clearly structured compositions with an amazing amount of detail. In all of her drawings, center and margins interact and negotiate meanings in multi-layered, recurring motifs. The marginalia illuminate the central figure’s deeds, adding depth, complexity, commentary, and explanation. Simply put, the center only holds because of the margin.

It seems entirely possible to get lost in these at times mystifying maps of experience. But while the work validates personal experience, it also transforms the ordinary into something of allegorical significance. This transformation is particularly profound in the case of Christine the Intrepid, Hours of Bona Sforza (2008), a drawing which centers on DiGennaro’s partner weaving nests for their two sons, while at the margins scenes of changing seasons and recurring cycles insist on the naturalness of this non-traditional family. Trees abound in the margins, their roots not only providing shelter for the sleeping figure, surrounded by friends who watch over her, but literally referencing the root, Latin radix, the stem of radicality. (The artist’s likeness, clad in a bird costume, is shown drawing tree branches in the top left corner.) In Marilyn the Sedulous, Hours of Bona Sforza (2008) the tree motif re-surfaces: a woman’s body merges into the heft of a tree trunk. There is rootedness here, and belonging, and the stitching together of homes that do not conform to the narrow traditionalism of the heterosexual family unit. In DiGennaro’s work, the still marginalized, still contested experience of living in Rainbow families is rendered in all its allegorical splendor in a radical reversal of whose experiences should count as potentially universal.

A similar emphasis on experience that, though ordinary, does not usually take center stage, occurs in Stacey Davidson‘s work–with one crucial difference: her protagonists are dolls, which the artist first fashions three-dimensionally, before portraying them in gouache. Carefully crafted, the dolls effortlessly resist playful platitudes along with the stilted lifelessness of collectors’ treasures. Their irresistible individuality sets them apart from dolls as mass-produced plastic projections of cultural fantasies, but they do share an uncanny affinity with the purposeful dolls used for mastering the unspeakable through playful, diminutive repetition in therapeutic settings.

When O’Neill-Butler invokes Sigmund Freud’s famous essay, "The Uncanny," in her discussion of Davidson’s work in the catalog, she is clearly on to something: the repressed returns, oddly familiar and strange at the same time, inspiring the proverbial double take and a plunge into intellectual uncertainty. What exactly is it that we are looking at here? A doll? A person? Some sort of fantastic doppelganger or hybrid? More to the point, what is it that returns to haunt us here?

Ironically, Davidson’s dolls seem to truly come to life once they are rendered in two dimensions: wistful and wise, smeared with lipstick and soot-stained, these dolls have a past that they come to inhabit fully in their portraits. In Fuck what’s hip, Lydia steps out to make a living (2007), we encounter a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe, slightly irked by the necessity of having to step out and take the initiative to tackle her economic plight. In Salt on pavement, two days after a light snow (2008), a girl in a swishy skirt sports a T-shirt that reads "I had an abortion." She calmly meets our gaze, her youth at odds with the patient weariness of her expression. A strange tension persists between the monochromatic gouache backgrounds and the eerie eloquence of the dolls’ faces and poses. As viewers, we are of course compelled to fill in the blanks, to create the story surrounding these snapshots of sorts. The question becomes what exactly we draw on in order to project our own narratives,
whether strictly personal or cultural, onto these doll portraits.

What returns to us, then, in the guise of Davidson’s dolls, are culturally coded moments, isolated from their usual context and from the familiar scripts we rely on to make meaning. Despite the visual isolation and emphatic lack of context, we recognize them. What the portraits offer us is a chance not only to fill in the blanks but to pay attention to, and possibly re-assess, just how exactly we go about doing that. Yet this offer is no abstract intellectual inquiry into perception, as the dolls remind us: stubbornly playful, eerie and humorous, they riff on the familiar and make it strange, inviting us to look, and look again. If what we thought we knew becomes a little less certain in the process, so much the better.

Thus this tale of monsters, maps, and marginalia comes to an end. What the work on view shares, beyond narratives, allegories, and symbolism, is the pronounced effort to disrupt the ordinariness of looking. We may retreat from the unexpected wisdom in the gaze of Davidson’s girl doll, and manage to find a way out of the dazzling mazes of experience DiGennaro maps in her drawings; we may emerge unscathed from the numbingly white surfaces of Vossler’s work, and surface from the depth of vision in Carlson’s paintings; yet, the most central question that arises from this particular story about these four artists insists on being answered: Where do we stand when we look at this work–personally, socially, culturally? At the margin? At the center? Out on a limb?