with all our amazing contradictions.
PHOTO BY TED AMSDEN
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| Odyssey: moving onward to the next millennium with all our amazing contradictions. PHOTO BY TED AMSDEN |
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By MELANIE BROWNE
Gallery Review
The Art Gallery of Northumberland is currently home to a strange collection of bodily manifestations. In a technique that descends from artists like Colette Whiten and George Segal, Northumberland Country artist Merike Lugus derives her sculpted forms from castings of the human body.
With a leaning towards the surreal and a sometimes startling visual vocabulary, there is more than a hint of the macabre in her current exhibition. For example: the face of one figure has been replaced by a camera lens, his legs thickening into massive stumps and an arm transforming into a draped wing. A young woman emerges from a delicate stocking-like cocoon and hangs, spinning on a string from the ceiling. A partial female figure is suspended on a crucifix, her breasts replaced with turned-out pockets.
While the full figures dominate the room it is, for me, Ms. Lugus' partial figures and less defined objects that exert the strongest pull on my attention and imagination. Indeed, the more abstract the forms, the more open they seem to interpretation and possibilities of meaning.
Her Nests/Pockets in the small gallery, for instance, are evocative and open-ended. Plaster casts of rough bowl or gourd-like shapes, cushioned with human hair, provide nesting places for rocks and moulded spheres. In several places there are flattened shapes that could be read as either crusty rolls ideal for ham and cheese, or disembodied human abdomens. They offer the kind of sneaky visual pun reminiscent of Dada and Surrealism -- at the same time funny and vaguely appalling.The female torso takes on various incarnations, but unlike its centuries-old treatment by male artists as an object of voyeuristic pleasure, here it becomes a receptacle for meaning and an assertion of a feminist ideal. Splayed on the wall it becomes a 'carapace', a protective shield that defies sensuality. Ranged on the floor, a small battalion of middle-aged torsos advance on truncated thighs, an image both absurd and rich with possibilities. Ms. Lugus recycles her forms, changing their meaning in each incarnation. One form serves for three pieces in the show, and is a vehicle for some of the artist's most eloquent statements.
In Valerie, the epoxy and fibreglass material becomes almost transparent. With the surface inlaid with polished agates that suggest wings of butterflies, the figure is delicate and spiritual.
Perhaps the most simply beautiful work in the show is Wood Nymph. Here the figure appears as part stone and part flesh, recalling both the ideal forms of classical art, and its wonderful stories of metamorphosis.
In Cloud Nine, the artist takes a campier approach and dresses her figure in a diaphanous white gown fastened, appropriately enough, with wing nuts, and framed against a cartoon-like cloud. Is this the Ascension of Barbie? Or is it the kind of heaven we're all secretly dreaming of?The questions arising from this exhibition will come thick and fast and the answers will emerge slowly. But curiosity, a character trait this artist has in abundance, can be contagious. So, if you go, be prepared to come down with something.
Merike Lugus: Transient States continues to March 1 at the Art Gallery of Northumberland. She will be giving a walking tour of the exhibition on February 8 at 2 p.m., accompanied by a mini-concert of new music by Rod Anderson. Also, on February 19 at 7 p.m., Margaret Rodgers of the Clarington Visual Arts Centre will give a talk entitled "Bread and Roses: Visual Arts and the Women's Movement" at the gallery.
The Cobourg Daily Star, January 15, 1998, page 7
[Reproduced here with the permission of The Cobourg Daily Star, Melanie Browne, and Ted Amsden.]