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Reviews / Essays... | |
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Weekend – Hamilton Spectator 1995 Artscape You'll laugh, you'll flinch By Jeff Mahoney "Open . . . Wider." How does that grab you for the title of a show? Kinda makes you shudder just a little, doesn't it? Like the sound of a drill. It shouldn't have to. Open wider could refer to anything: your eyes, your mind, the doors to new rooms. But no one who was born in our culture in the last 100 years can hear "Open . . . wider," without thinking about the dentist. And Fiona Kinsella, the artist whose show this is, doesn't disappoint. It's those dots between "open" and "wider" - they do all the work in that phrase. That pregnant pause. It says, "For the awful things I'm going to be doing in your mouth, I'll need enough room to swing a cat." Wider. Kinsella's show is not really about dentistry or even teeth. But it is about pain . . . and revelation, of one kind or another. The one piece in the show that is specifically about dentistry is inspired, allegorical, brutal to look at, hilarious, familiar and repulsive at the same time. It is an aluminum surface covered over with some kind of cellophane. And on the aluminum are dental photographs and negatives of teeth caged in braces. There is a picture of lips held open with steel clamps, revealing teeth with braces. There is also a set of dentures with a rose between the teeth, and a medical diagram of an esophagus and the digestive tract leading from it. But the clincher in the piece is the text that Kinsella has scratched roughly, barely legibly, into the aluminum, as though written by someone squirming in a chair, undergoing a root canal. The text tells of St. Appolonia, the patron saint of dentistry, and how she was tortured for her Christian beliefs. Then it goes on to describe the artist's sister going into shock after having her wisdom teeth pulled. And her brother almost losing an eye when his face swelled after some dental work. The text concludes with the line:"I'm due for an appointment." The whole piece achieves the wonderful, peculiar paradox of making you laugh and feel distinctly uncomfortable all at the same time. That is a property of many of Kinsella's works in the show - this strangely engaging tug of self-contradiction. Kinsella has minted an iconography of often disturbing, destabilizing, images. In her work, there are pictures of diseased eyes and circus freaks and a kind of veiled rape, using old photographs of nudes by Muybridge. But these images, which are usually expressed as color transfers and shuffled together in quirky collages, are often part of a larger camouflage. Sometimes what is unsettling on its own becomes less so, or differently so, when considered in context. There is, for instance, the "Not nice to stare" piece which features images of diseased eyes, presumably taken from a medical textbook, transferred onto hand-made paper. The horror of the image is subverted by the bland admonition "Not nice to stare," printed large around the images, and by the absurd projection of an actual pair of round spectacles from the surface of the piece. There are clever, cutting, sometimes poignant ironies being touched off all through the show, many of them having to do with themes of "opening" - as with eyes or mouths or wounds. In one large, enigmatic piece, full of a kind of glowing ember motif, there is the line, "the length of your pain is here" with an arrow pointing to a cross-section of the brain. The meaning is elliptical - poetic rather than specific - but here again are the chords of pain and revelation that are being struck everywhere in the show. There is a level at which Kinsella's art is cryptic and ambiguous, but its political force is expressed with sharp clarity. One of the best pieces of the show, Beauty Is Political, is a figure of a nude woman, her bare breasts partly obscured by ropes of beaded necklace and her womb exposed to reveal dozens of bright red eggs. The image of the red egg is lifted beyond the picture and taken up sculpturally with numerous red eggs mounted on the wall around several of the pieces. In an age when conviction is often dismissed as political correctness, it is refreshing to see Kinsella throw some weight around. Her show, overall, is a thoughtful, innovative, and often unsettling suite of works, both thematically and stylistically. And that title. Gotta love it. Much of the work deliberately subverts conventional ideas of the beautiful in art, and as such it runs the risk of being judged unfavorably by those very standards. Indeed, one or two of the pieces here are esthetically difficult to get around, but they all reward the effort to understand them on their own terms. OK, rinse and spit. The show runs at the Hamilton Artists Inc. Gallery, 103 Vine St., until Aug. 17. (The show is put on by Kinsella, not the Hamilton Artists Inc.). Illustration(s): Photo: Artist Fiona Kinsella with one of her pieces from her current show at the Hamilton Artists Inc. Gallery. |
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