Volume 3, Issue 19
Septemebr 13 - September 26, 2001

ART

WEATHER REPORT
@
PIRATE: A CONTEMPORARY ART OASIS

3659 Navajo St., 303-458-6058
Through September 16

What do you get by mixing powerful women, needy men and new shoes? Add tornado and yellow brick road, and you'll find Surrender Dorothy, an installation by Kathy Hutton at Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis.

Fairy tales fuel our archetypal themes, and The Wizard of Oz-- movie version, not the less familiar book-- certainly qualifies as modern search-for-self fable. Hutton contrasts the Oz story with the far earlier tale of Cinderella. Here, Dorothy's world is that beginning spiral of yellow bricks-- with shimmering bead-encrusted red high heels-- leading to a tornado. Crafted from paper over a wire armature, this funnel cloud is ceiling-high and slightly translucent. At its base is a shattered picnic basket-- broken goblets, cracked-open and empty eggshells.

Running across the yellow brick road is a long panel of white paper, straight and narrow. A pair of glass slippers, joined from pieces like a stained glass window, rests at one end of the paper, and a pristine picnic basket sits at the other-- two matching goblets and a safely nestled golden egg. Along the paper's length are pencil-drawn images-- an iron, a blender, a gestating baby (complete with electrical cord like blender and iron), a pair of scissors, flowers-- and a selection of cursive-written words, including 'marriage', 'duties', 'suburbs', 'childbirth'.

Hutton contrasts two potential female life-paths: a straight and narrow "nice girl" route versus a "wild girl" road of sinuous curves, snazzy red shoes and threatening weather. As Hutton details in her written statement, Oz's young female protagonist inherits magical shoes from powerful women, while in Cinderella the prince is looking for wife-material to fill those glass shoes exactly (though I'd point out, those glass slippers originally came from another magical woman, the Fairy Godmother). The tornado is a potent symbol of sweeping, often destructive change, and Dorothy's trip through Oz is rife with needy men whose personal goals and quests increase her own danger.

Pirate's so often packed to the max with wall-hung works and sculpture stands, it's a treat to see the space used in this far more sparse manner. Surrender Dorothy occupies the gallery's back wall and corner area, leaving lots of open space. The lighting is dramatic and effective, and seen post-opening without milling people, the visual impact is heightened. That's one beauty of good installation art: spaces can be filled with ideas instead of stuff.

A gripe: much of the piece's more subtle interpretation depends on the artist's written statement even though she's got plenty of powerful images available. For example, Cinderella's constrained path could probably rely on Hutton's well-drawn images without any added verbiage. Words like 'dependence' and 'childbirth' made it easy for one viewer to grouse dismissively about "the same old feminist stuff." Yeah, those antiquated questions about childbearing and conflicting life choices do seem to stick around, darn it.

In Pirate's back room, Patti Leota Genack shifts us from tornadoes to hail storms, with the main large wall-and-floor piece, "Flying into the Patio Door of Life," taking on the destruction and subsequent insurance company phone-tag tedium of damage claims. A roll of tar paper along the floor serves as resting place for shattered flower pots and other ruined lawn-wares. On the wall is a line of telephones surmounted by one of Genack's signature huge charcoal drawings, in this case a convoluted nude woman slammed up against the aforementioned patio door. Genack also shows a handful of adept and far more restful garden-oriented oil paintings, including "Almighty Weed Control" and "Hail to the Rudbeckia."

The main event here, though, is Surrender Dorothy. Try to see it unpeopled, for more serene comtemplation and visual pleasure.

--Renna Shesso