Katherine Shaughnessy: Doegirl–and Other Adventures in Bioengineering
Helen Mirra
The excess of Shaughnessy’s exhibit–the multiple animals and flowers and the painted forest backdrops–gives it an immediate visual appeal. And the combination of Disney-esque images with the caged mutants suggests a world that maintains perfection by imprisoning every being that’s different, even those as innocuous as her charming mutants–a fawn with two heads, a squirrel with a baby-boy head. Even the lamb with baby legs for horns reads more like a collage of toys than a real creature. There’s also something appealing about the contrast between the show’s bucolic fantasy and the gritty setting.
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If there’s an idea here it’s that butter can be or suggest anything, from insubstantial yellow light to ideas of ascent to an oversize unit. Butter has no essential nature, it’s just what artists make of it–a pomo idea at odds with concepts like “truth” but perfectly suited to something as neutral as butter. Indeed, the artists’ playfulness, producing an improbable diversity of works, is what makes this exhibit a delight. In Carla Preiss’s gouache I Can’t Believe, the words are dimly visible as white letters on a yellow field; Aimee Beaubien and Art Jones in Everything’s Better show a book whose pages are covered with butter, oozing thick gobs as the book is slowly closed in an accompanying video. Barbara Koenen in “(PARKAY)” has put tiny daubs of butter and imitation butter on the wall over the kitchen sink. And Andrew Rubinstein in Power Figures embeds porcelain shards and corn-cob holders in butter sticks in the manner of African fetish sculptures, which have foreign objects driven into them to give them power.
What I liked about these pieces was their mixture of ambition and modesty: wishing to embrace, even gird, the planet, the artist also lets her art be determined by the earth’s actual form rather than trying to reshape it, as in the sidewalk pieces. Two other works are even sparser visually: Rounding Cape Horn and Crossing the Equator show a blue thread sewn onto blue paper in a single curving line like the route a ship might take, neatly conflating the domesticity of sewing and a long voyage.
