Artist Anne Marie
McDonnell takes a wicked bite out of
By MICHAEL
FRESSOLA
Of course, whenever you badly need a laugh, you think:
I'll just nip out and get happy with some contemporary art
But the new work of sculptor Anne Marie McDonnell
actually gives you something to think about even as you throw back your head
and howl.
These days , the West
Brighton-based sculptor is thinking about food prep and mayhem, Christianity
and pop art. "America Cooks," her new and wickedly funny new series,
is at Vlepo Gallery in St. George, just in time for the season of rampant
feasting.
The star of the show is a kind of Pillsbury
doughboy/Michelin Man character. Porky and white as Frosty the Snow Man, he
wears a toque and carries a knife.
The sculptor, often comfortable in several media, has
created him in Model Magic, a crumbly, non-serious material, of all the silly
things. She's done prints and color photographs and a few precious bronzes in
which her Doughdude appears in a series of pointed foodie dramas.
In the work called "Uh Oh!" he's assembling
pies that will be filled, it seems certain, with the four plump rats scurrying
on the countertop.
In another set-up, he's grinning and pointing a gun at
a Four-and-Twenty-Blackbird pie bursting with chirping birdies. In "Can
This Marriage be Saved," our chef turns into
combination Sweeney Todd/Maya high priest.
He's plunged a knife into a wedding cake and pulled
out a bleeding, beating heart!
The artist intends for us to understand the kitchen as
a kind of holy place of Pop sensibilities. After all, where did Warhol find his
soups cans?
Like Warhol, Ms. McDonnell is interested in religious
connections. A couple of saints, including Martha, the exasperated housekeeper
of the New Testament, make appearances in "America Cooks."
Otherwise, Ms. McDonnell's kitchen is amoral. Imagine
tough-minded "Mr. Ripley" novelist Patricia Highsmith in an apron.
McDonnell's sculptural sensibilities often recall Tom Otterness, the ingenious
satirist who has been reminding New Yorkers that fine art can be funny for 15
years now.
A few years back, his fractured fairytale bronzes were
big favorites at the
Ms. McDonnell's bronzes are the final state of the
Model Magic prototypes (the MM compound is too unstable to last). She is
considering doing them in a sturdier format that would be less costly than
bronze.
The ideas in this series have spilled -- gouts of
blood everywhere -- into several other formats: Photographs, mixed-media prints
and drawings. All are fun.
In the prints, an overlaid silhouette tells a grim
story, the kind Charles Addams would have loved: A hand dangles a tiny flailing
human figure over a voracious B-bird pie.
The artist's isn't wholly carnivorous. In the set-up
called "The Sanctity of Vegetables," a triumphant figure holds a
bunch of beets high over his head. If animal life is too sacred to be eaten,
who is to say that cucumbers and butter beans don't have rights too...The
Freegan movement, a radical stop-the-waste effort that extols dumpster-diving,
is celebrated/tweaked in "The Freegan Chef." It puts our fearless
foodworker upside down in a garbage pail. How Grover would love this one. WHAT
"America Cooks" new work by Anne Marie McDonnell WHERE Vlepo Gallery
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