Marnie Weber: From the Dust Room @ Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Kim Bockus
Marnie Weber and her assistants match up arms and legs with torsos and pull costumes from garment bags that spill over like over-stuffed piñatas. They are reconstructing the animal protagonists of Weber’s 2001 video, the Forgotten, which along with her massive set piece, the Dollhouse, and a miniature ship titled Siren Song, make up the sculpture part of the Luckman installation.
First shown in Who’s The Most Forgotten of Them All? at Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York and now making their West coast debut, each animal’s character comes to life as Weber coaxes fur and clothing into shape and repositions them according to affinities with surrounding pieces. When she sets up sightlines between The Bunny and The Sheep I get the eerie feeling that some kind of communication is going on between them.
Mid-morning there’s a sudden halt to the activity–everyone stops to watch as a newly purchased child-sized mannequin is pulled from its box. The child is quickly assembled–just the right size for the diminutive Snow Monkey costume and a contrast to the Amazonian proportions of some of the other sculptures. Throughout the gallery Weber’s sleight-of-scale works palpable magic, loosening the visitor’s hold on everyday reality. A ten foot-long dollhouse anchors the main space, its stepping stones lead toward a tiny front door and beckon in invitation to the realm inside. The back of the house opens up into eleven rooms, source material for the large photographs in The Dollhouse series. Further along the wall a different kind of architecture frames Weber’s second series in the exhibition–Louis XIV rooms from the Getty Museum’s south pavilion serve as background images for the Getty series. Here, collaged elements collide headlong with the hermetic artificiality of the museum’s interiors; lavish rooms and ornate beds are destabilized by visitations from sheet-wearing apparitions and the appearance of giant-sized faces in windows.
Weber’s photographs act as canvases for a prolific number of hybridized life forms. Here and there, she has added bat or butterfly wings to women’s bodies, and several sculptures meld animal and human components in a Dr. Moreau-like mix. In contrast to the genetic activity going on behind the scenes the mood of the photographs is one of stillness–figures and animals seem transfixed, inert and suspended in a knowing passivity. The all-female cast are most often positioned facing towards the picture plane in solitary communion with the viewer, as if willing us to animate the scene and complete their stories internally. Like that of her literary counterparts H. C. Andersen, Lewis Carroll and Isak Dinesen, Weber’s work operates within the classic dynamics of psychological transformation essential to the fairy tale or storybook genre. Viewers projecting themselves into Weber’s vivid scenes become participants in the quests, tests and rites of passage suggested by the work’s complex and inventive realities.
After lunch, things are winding down as the last of the photographs is hung. The sound of moaning permeates the gallery and heads turn towards the south doors. Weber has activated the CD soundtrack housed inside her Siren Song sculpture, an enigmatic feather-covered sailing ship that stands almost seven feet high. The ship is flanked by images from the Graveyard series, moody under-lit scenes from Los Angeles’ most celebrated graveyard, the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Final resting place to a string of screen legends like Rudolph Valentino, Jayne Mansfield and Tyrone Power, the cemetery’s classical statuary and lakeside temple are animated by collaged dramas of nudes and swans, floating eggs, voluminous clouds of petals and a rearing Pegasus look-alike. Allusions to the afterlife are unmistakable, a natural extension of the artist’s preoccupation with the forces that seem to threaten her characters at every turn. The undercurrents of danger in Weber’s work suggest an inexorable cycle of disaster and deliverance; girlish dollhouse rooms are invaded by icy stalactites and flooded floors, and a wall of taxidermy animal heads gazes down upon a velvet-dressed girl holding a drawn sword. The theme is developed further in Weber’s new performance piece The Spirit Girls, Songs that Never Die, where the transformational vernacular of the genre again asserts itself in a story driven by external obstacles to the heroines’ progress.
The exhibition includes a selection of videos in the artist’s signature style–a potent low-tech look that evokes a sense of the untamed–differentiating it from other (more consciously conceived) fantasy work.
