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Grappling with an over-active imagination isn’t always easy, but artist Amy Cutler manages to make the feat appear at once effortless and well worth the try. With her drawing and gouache on paper fabrications, Cutler first establishes elaborate alternative frameworks of reality and culture and follows up by throwing women and girls of every age and pigtail length into that conjured up realm’s particular mix. By the time we see them, the female characters are completely adjusted to and invested in whatever ritualized action or bizarre environment Cutler has dreamed up for them. |
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Curious Cutlery – Whitney May
Grappling with an over-active imagination isn’t always easy, but artist Amy Cutler manages to make the feat appear at once effortless and well worth the try. With her drawing and gouache on paper fabrications, Cutler first establishes elaborate alternative frameworks of reality and culture and follows up by throwing women and girls of every age and pigtail length into that conjured up realm’s particular mix. By the time we see them, the female characters are completely adjusted to and invested in whatever ritualized action or bizarre environment Cutler has dreamed up for them. If the artist’s scenes can be called surrealistic, it’s only so in our eyes. Babies with birdhouses for heads, pillows as hairpieces and ironing boards for belts are all handled by Cutler as commonplace—without the slightest hint at the subject matter’s potential for shock value.
In the first traveling exhibition of her work, organized by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which I caught at the David Winton Bell Gallery while in Providence, Rhode Island, this winter, the solemn, weather-worn and apparently unfazed characters making up Cutler’s recent oeuvre popped right off of their blank, white paper and white-walled backdrop, straight into the viewer’s space—every one of them ready and willing to perplex and fascinate, but without letting on.
`In works like her Viragos, in which six or more pigtailed girls enter into the picture plane from elsewhere while balancing impossible numbers of birdhouses, gourds, jugs, baskets and birdcages, the implication of narrative is present, but never fully formed or concrete. The viewer is not meant to ponder where these girls, with hair stretched to its limits for extra birdcage toting capacity, are going or why, but only the convoluted mechanism of the carrying device itself. Like an extensive rite of passage or ritualistic challenge, these characters undergo a task that would seem to cause great discomfort and pain, without flinching. But, then again, Amy’s world is a whole other realm—one very much removed from any logic-driven reality to which we are accustomed. Perhaps, in this place, pigtails are stronger than metal cables or well-tied knots and birdhouses are the most precious commodity of all. Nothing is stated with any certainty in Cutler’s imagery; the worlds she creates defy not only our reality’s logic, but also any coherence within and of themselves.
The theme of birdhouses recurs throughout Cutler’s oeuvre, but nowhere is this motif more notably and more disturbingly incorporated than in her work Dwelling. In the world of this painting, dark haired, grown women frown as they stand before a kneeling assembly of birdhouse-headed children who appear alert and unsmiling in front of these three mother-like figures. One of the women holds a baby of the unsettling, birdhouse-headed species in her arms, but without a single hint of tenderness. Perhaps most disquieting of all, however, are the human-like and varied anthropomorphic features of these beings, which stare blankly out from the grains making up their wooden visages to three unmoved women.
The characters here appear also as vagabonds, with all their belongings tied securely to their backs, including their own beds for the night to come. Pillows become hairpieces and well-rigged wooden gables and tents make a hat for each, their shelter. Trailing behind the group is a younger girl who bears the burden of two large pillows, which sandwich her senseless from the waist up. There is a definite pecking order here. In this work, and especially through the incorporation of this younger character, Cutler establishes a mini-society whose way of life appears extremely well ordered, well oiled and precise. What one ascertains immediately in this image is that the hierarchy at hand is well instated and running smoothly. If there is no love apparent between the members of this group, so be it—at least there is order, pretty dresses and a roof over (nearly) everyone’s head. The real object and focus of this image, however, is not the pecking order itself—for this is obvious—it is instead discerning the relationships between the characters themselves. Unfortunately, this much is inscrutable, and Cutler means it that way.
In the end, Amy’s works are never playful despite their whimsicality—they are instead humorless and grave at every turn. In each image, the characters stand isolated against a great, white void that only increases the glare of their burdens and their gloom. In Cutler’s fabrications, all things function seamlessly, oddly, and elaborately but force out of the frame even a single smile.
