Seattle P-I April 23, 2004
by Regina Hackett
READ ARTICLE
Seattle Weekly April 14, 2004
by Elise Richman
READ ARTICLE
The Stranger April 4, 2004
Mandy Greer's Fairy Tale
by Emily Hall
READ ARTICLE AT RIGHT > >
The Stranger Jan 29, 2004
by Emily Hall
READ ARTICLE
The Stranger September 10, 2003
by Emily Hall
READ ARTICLE
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THE ARTIST, THE PRINCESS, THE WOLF
Mandy Greer's Fairy Tale
by Emily Hall
Mandy Greer at Priceless Works Gallery
619 N 35th St, 349-9943
Through April 25.
Mandy Greer's current installation, The Wolf Prince and the
Parrot Princess, is both fairy tale and meditation on fairy
tales: a love story fully aware of how atypical it is. (If
this story were written, it would be by A. S. Byatt.) This
is not easy Disney-style love, but the more gruesome and
hungry kind you find in unsanitized Grimm stories: "When I
was young," the artist writes, "I never dreamed of a Prince
on a White Horse to come sweep me away, but a Wolf Prince to
chase me across the snow, tear me to pieces, and devour me."
The protagonists here are a fine and mismatched pair
assembled out of fabric, feathers, and thousands of
meticulous stitches: a handsome wolf, mounted like a trophy
against copious dun-colored drapery, all shaggy jowls and
pricked ears and yards and yards of crocheted and jeweled
blood lolling out of his damask-tongued mouth; and the
parrot princess, mounted against a field of chinoiserie on a
knitted and sequined branch, with her pert, inquisitive head
poking dearly out of a tartan ruffled collar.
There is also a vast, pristine topography suggested by an
enormous chandelier of white pompoms, clustered and draped
and spectacular, hung over a white braided rag rug. This is
the snow of the artist's fantasy, and its bridal purity
seems to call out for the blood that drips from the wolf's
mouth. These three works triangulate in interesting,
unexpected, but absolutely logical ways, although they are
installed in a way I can't quite parse--instead of the wolf
and the parrot separated by the field of snow, the princess
is set off to the side, perhaps a little longingly.
In the last year or so, Greer's sculptures have moved from
inhabiting vague although vivid fantastical realms to this
more structured world of fairy tales of the artist's own
invention. Where before there were tiers of animals--with
intricately jeweled bottoms and rosy rectums--clustered for
a reason not discernible around a single point, or a
flamingo-like structure cantilevered off a wall, now there
is a narrative, like this one, and like the performance work
Greer debuted last summer at Thread's Fashion Is Art, a
silent-film-style work about a bear that discovers it's
actually a bird (with gorgeous costumes, as you might
expect).
Greer's work never lacked narrative, which is to say that
its absence didn't detract one whit from the work's power or
theatricality, but the addition of narrative has had an
interesting effect: The story abstracts the animals, turning
them into archetypes. This, of course, is a paradox, because
Greer is hardly trafficking in banalities (the tale she
imagines is rather stunningly honest about appetites and
cruelty and devotion), but it is a paradox that her work is
quite comfortable with: the atypical archetype. It is only
one in a series of contrasts that animate her work: between
homeliness and glitz, love and violence, the decorative and
the meaningful.
Greer's installations avoid the saccharine, although she
freely makes use of saccharine elements. There's a toughness
that sidesteps the implications of prettiness, sequins,
ruffles, sewing, love. In an interview a few years ago, I
asked Greer about the tension between the femininity of
sewing and the obvious masculine elements in her work--such
as a horse, from that era, with enormous lace testicles--and
she said, "The way I sew is not really feminine. I joke
around that I sew like a bachelor, like I'm sewing a button
on. I sew like a man." The sewing, in other words, is not
marshaled toward an act of love, as it is assumed to be
in "women's work." In a pair of Greer's Victorian-ish
confections off to the side of the main installation--they
look like urns decked out for mourning--the balance tips
more to morbid, a kind of superhuman effort applied to the
gloomy rather than the pretty.
Greer's two-dimensional works shown here are less
convincing: fabric stretched over frames in heraldic and
decorative shapes, each surrounded by a ruffle, and with a
collage assembled on it, with printed silhouettes of
parrots, wolves, and other more or less relevant shapes.
These lose the specificity of the tale, are too emblematic--
they fail in roughly the same way that some of Matthew
Barney's sculptures fail relative to his spectaculars: They
feel like souvenirs. Never mind: The power of the three main
sculptures carries the show.
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