"Damaged" by Carol Collicutt.
Mary E. Black Gallery
Ex Corpore
Carol Collicutt and WhiteFeather
Curator, Léola Le Blanc
January 8 to February 21 – 2010
Ex Corpore
Pearls on pig gut, flowers and feathers
Fishnet and needles, fur, hair and fabric
Bleached bits of bone and black shiny beads
Corks, doilies, and pink plastic wraps
These are a few of their favourite things
These are not Maria von Trapp’s favourite things. These are some of Carol Collicutt’s and WhiteFeather’s favoured things in their collaborative exhibition entitled Ex Corpore. Loosely translated, Ex implies ‘out of’ or ‘from’, and Corpore denotes body. Either one, ‘out of body’ or ‘from the body’, defines a relationship to the body and is a suitable title highlighting how we may engage in creating and maintaining a sense of self. The human body is a contentious object, surprisingly strong given its calcium based construct and housed in flesh, fluids and hair and bearing the heavy load of social, cultural and political baggage. What Collicutt and WhiteFeather choose to present is strongly visceral, vacillating between allure and repulsion. Conventionally lovely, endearing objects – dolls, embroidery hoops, a wedding dress – have been cleaved from their habitual loci of innocence, whimsy and fancy and transcribed into a space reminiscent of a 17th and 18th century cabinet of curiosities. Ex Corpore is evocative of Frankenstein’s laboratory where the genesis of hybrids and chimera propagate. Frankenstein was a creator. He created a monster. However, the Grand creator, Mary Shelley, crafted both horrors, Frankenstein and his fiend, in an eloquent literary form. Similarly, Ex Corpore’s creators do both, that is to say breathe life into seemingly repulsive entities fabricated from discarded, organic and inorganic detritus while orchestrating an exhibition that is disturbing yet provocative. These elements are reprehensible in their material history, yet captivating in their ability to seduce and beguile us.
Animal gut is the fundamental infrastructure for Carol Collicutt’s body of work. As living tissue it is subject to deterioration, decay, and death. However, once extricated and dried it is permanent and manipulatable. Yet, manipulating the gut is tantamount to a medical performance; slit the gut open, lay it out, avoid its unyielding slipperiness, form it into pretty much any of your desired proclivities. Sculpting, assembling, and shaping this ephemeral material is an invasive procedure not unlike Collicutt’s investigations on issues of beauty, youth, immutability, and intervention. Corresponding issues echo gender specific ailments and disease that require surgical intervention like breast cancer and hysterectomies. Her concentration equally challenges concerns afflicting the most exterior of our body organs, the skin. In a series of ‘specimen-like’ cameos, animal gut is stretched tautly across embroidery hoops and displays undesirable skin afflictions like scar tissues, blisters and scabs. They are beautiful and transparent yet are suggestive of large scales or patches of dried, yellowed, shed skin. Equally exquisite is a life-size wedding dress adorned with found, handed-down, and discarded pearls, fabricated entirely out of animal intestines. Who then is the intended bride for such a monstrously sublime gown? Was the bride’s predestined based on a gut feeling?
When I think of little dolls I think big head and eyes, infantile body, cuddly, soft little garments… WhiteFeather’s ‘little dolls’ are the antithesis of sweet little Baby Jane. True, they are similar in stature, have two arms and legs, most of time. However, the similarity stops there. Their little heads, mostly swathed in fishnet hosiery, are sightless; their eye sockets are empty. But are they blind? As spectators we are the ones compelled not only to look at but into these repugnant little creatures. These anthropomorphic beings are stitched-up from human hair, bones, fur, corncobs, corks, doilies, hosiery, tulle, parts of a pink plastic umbrella, and fabric reminiscent of toile de Jouy. One would think that the latter would infuse the little creatures, which are genderless, with feminine attributes. No, these little dolls are more the type Wednesday, the younger of the Adams family’s little cherub, would have concocted in her bedroom laboratory. However, WhiteFeather’s creatures, although repugnant, go beyond revulsion. They are affective. By piecing together tossed, lost, and discarded materials, WhiteFeather transmogrifies disparate, disembodied objects and breathes a renewed life into her entities. We do end up looking into them, gazing intently with and for our needs, hopes and desires concerning issues, both psychologically and physically, of the now and after, of immortality.
Ex Corpore is a symbiotic relationship between Carol Collicutt and WhiteFeather. Both artists focus simultaneously on the internal ‘from’ the body as well as the external ‘out of’ body. Collicutt encroaches on our continually narrow confines of beauty, probing into and under the skin, materializing issues and desires of beauty, youth, and eternity. Hers is an inquiry into our constantly flexing boundaries between science, medicine, and nature. Do our fixations with immutability and transcendence demand endorsing such drastic procedures which entail injection, suction, implants, purging, excising, or shedding? What Collicutt reminds us is that with all our attention and fixations on surface we are still coupled with our internal structures that are also subject to a limited lifespan as well as a variety of ailments that have profound repercussions on our physical and mental states.
Likewise, WhiteFeather concocts creatures resembling what most of us would think of as voodoo dolls, effigies, or idols. They are for the most part miniscule humanoids with the exception of Alma, which is a full-scale female entity. These little creatures are highly sophisticated in their make-up: with their imprinted toile waxed skin they resemble highly tattooed wild beings that parade themselves in lacy garments and see-through plastic dresses, showing mostly their bare baby doll limbs, some fabricated out of bone, chair spindles or cork. They are extremely freakish and sinister, yet they beguile us. They bewitch us through a reciprocal demand that we possess them as they possess us. The attraction is partly based in our unfulfilled concerns on the subject of loss and desire. The strength of this motley crew comes from their potential in providing mechanisms to cope with fears concerning the confrontations between life and death, body and spirit, private and the public. What WhiteFeather offers us are anthropomorphic vessels that may fulfill and assuage these needs in ways unorthodox and often resisted in established scientific and religious doctrines.