Monsters
by Sally McKay
Sally is a writer, artist and co-founder of Lola magazine.
This review was posted
November 23, 2003 at
digitalmediatree.com/
sallymckay/.
I like it when Lisa Neighbour works with monsters. Her piece in the current group show by Persona Volare is an eight-foot high drawing of The Hulk, made with macraméd electrical cords that power two green lightbulbs for the eyes. Lisa had been working with power cords and interesting light bulbs for a while. The Hulk is my favourite. The big pop monster icon is a great foil for the artsy-crafty hippy reference of the macramé. And I do find something monstrous in the fact that so much cord, and so much work, is embedded in a line of current that is only lighting two small bulbs. There's a scary store of unused energy in the piece that is mounting and waiting to blow. Lisa's last piece, for Persona Volare (the 2000 incarnation of P. Cantare), was a wall full of cheap-ass ugly coffeecups and rocks for smashing them. Which we did, in a sort of fun-house art catharsis.
Another piece in the show that I like is Chantal Rousseau's sweet, little, ceiling video installation. You have to climb up a ladder and poke your head up into the cobwebs through a gap in the tiles. There you'll see an animation of skulls licking each other and bouncing around, flickering in the corner behind the ducts.
Rebecca Diederichs' piece, (a gorgeous collaboration with her late husband, Reid) really has my brain gears going. But she is a good friend and co-art-conspirator so I will write more in depth about her work at a later date.