Stephanie Hier / Walnuts and pears you plant for your heirs
16.06 - 21.07.18
David Dale Gallery
161 Broad Street
Glasgow
We haven't any and you're too young.
A short essay on the work of
Stephanie Hier
Claire Walsh
Wandering through the Wonderland of
Lewis Carroll’s famous tale, the child protagonist Alice asks for directions
from a speaking cat with insights into the inner workings of this strange world
(the cat’s summation: “we’re all mad here”[1]). Alice:
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Cat: “That
depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” Alice: “I don't much care where—” Cat: “Then it
doesn't matter which way you go.” Appearing and disappearing at will and
threatened by no one, the Cheshire Cat occupies the position of a grinning
outsider to the tribulations of the other Wonderland characters. Opaquely, it
tells Alice that if she walks for long enough she’s sure to get somewhere.
In her artist statement, Stephanie
Hier reflects on time spent traversing digital space; “no idle query is
protected against the danger of an afternoon lost down the rabbit hole of
search to search.”[2] She
is interested in the ways imagery is consumed in the 21st century, how meanings
shift as images are brought together temporarily by algorithms seemingly
indifferent to hierarchies of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and how we experience
art and painting within this continuum. An online search for ‘rabbit’ took me
to a constellation of thumbnails ranging from pet photos, costumes, roadkill
and Bugs Bunny to 17th century ‘still life’ paintings of dead game strung up by
the hind legs next to bowls of fruit and silverware. Her work, she writes,
emerges from this “flatness of possibility”.
Imagery taken from clipart, personal
photographs and the Golden Age of American animation—the era of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Betty
Boop and Wile E. Coyote among many others—shares a canvas with painted scenes
recalling 17th and 18th century European classical figurative painting in the
styles of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Jacob van Ruisdael and Jean-Honoré
Fragonard. For example, in the current exhibition the painting Hot tongue and a cold shoulder features
Foghorn Leghorn and Henery Hawk, two avian characters from a 1940s Looney Tunes
cartoon, with sections of their bodies cut away to reveal a meticulous
underpainting of fruit and silverware in 17th century Dutch still life style. As
with this work, traditional figurative elements tend to appear in the
background of Hier’s paintings, with the cartoon or illustrative imagery in the
foreground often looking like humorous later additions made by another hand. A
number of works feature temporary tattoos but aside from these each element is
hand-painted or hand-wrought (in
the case of the ceramic frames)
by Hier, who
trained in both classical painting and animation.
Some of the titles read as
old-fashioned parenting idioms, or things that an adult might say to a child.
For example, the name of her recent solo exhibition at NEOCHROME in Turin, Be true to your teeth and they won’t be
false to you, and titles of paintings including, More important to click with people; It comes soon enough; Knee
high to a grasshopper and Got more
nerve than a bum tooth. These captions add a further layer of framing to
the images, supporting a light-hearted but sometimes awkward dialogue between
‘older’ and ‘newer’ components.
Adult/child
and adult/adolescent dynamics seem to emerge within
the work; from the array of visual references on Hier’s canvases (classical painting,
template tattoos, cartoon imagery) to her use of materials (oil on canvas, image transfer, handworked ceramic) and their
associated ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural values. This text outlines interactions between
these elements, looking at the use of temporary tattoos in particular, and links
Hier’s practice with artists whose works explore the connections between
childhood imagery and adult identity.
Hier describes using temporary
tattoos and their templated imagery within her work as a means of “elevating
the status of the mass produced (ready-made) to that of painting.”[3] A
number of works in the current exhibition feature these ‘ready-made’ images. The
swirling picture of a tiger in a fantasy landscape that appears at the centre
of the painting Clinging to the life raft,
for example, is a life-size full back temporary tattoo. In another work, Finer than a frog hair, a colour tattoo
illustrating two birds in a tree has been transferred directly onto the centre
of a blank canvas. In this analogy, canvases are like bodies. On their
stretched skin-like surfaces, Hier folds in imagery from multiple sources. By
transferring these materials to the canvas, she points to how images are read
differently in different contexts. In a text accompanying the exhibition Be true to your teeth and they won’t be
false to you, curator Lumi Tan remarks on the fetishisation of
mass-produced imagery such as template tattoos within the sanctified spaces of
the art world: “We may judge the appearance of a pink butterfly on a human
body, but would never do so on the wall.”[4]
These types of temporary image
transfer have been in circulation since the early 20th century, beginning with
simple food colouring ‘spit designs’ marketed to children which were
transferrable onto skin by water or saliva, before newer methods of printing
onto translucent film were developed in the 80s. The drive for more
sophisticated and realistic designs that resulted in these new printing
processes coincided with Hollywood’s desire for a product that could be used to
temporarily tattoo actors, allowing them to inhabit certain roles more
legitimately.[5] As
with the actors needing to move fluidly from one identity to another for work;
temporary tattoos, like fluorescent hair dyes and piercings, represent
temporarily constructed identities associated with passing ‘phases’ of
childhood and adolescence.
Artists like Bunny Rogers (b. 1990)
and Ellen Cantor (1961-2013) provide us with rich frameworks for thinking about
the connections between childhood imagery and adult identity. In different
ways, their works underline the significance of popular childhood imagery and
template characters (for Cantor this was Disney and Hollywood, for Rogers,
Neopets and Second Life) and embody the intense and earnest ways that young
people consume and connect with imagery and characters from pop culture. Donna
Schons describes these affiliations in relation to Rogers’s work: “Ridden by
insecurities connected to the transition from children to grown-ups, young
adults identify with pop culture in unsurpassed ways.”[6] While
these connections are often considered unimportant and superficial by adults,
Rogers forefronts the intensity of these kinships through her first person
poetry, installations and objects featuring material from her preteen and
adolescent years.
Writing about the references to
cartoon animation in Hier’s work, Lumi Tan gives a brief outline of the technology
that was key to the phenomena and widespread appeal of Disney in the 20th
century. The singular popularity of early Disney animations, Tan explains, was
aided by the studio’s pioneering use of the multiplane camera. They would shoot
through several layers of imagery at differing transparencies; creating “a
heightened sense of dimensionality in which 2-D characters could more readily
exist in 3-D space.”[7] She
gives the example of The Old Mill
(1937), an early Silly Symphony short in which small woodland creatures
including frogs and birds experience a violent night time storm: “The
combination of lucid depth perception in the highly detailed backgrounds with
the far more simply rendered eyes of the panicked animals effectively draws out
a sympathetic reaction from viewers; their temporary peril feels in and of our
world.” Since then, at quickening pace, cartoon characters have stepped further
and deeper into the spaces of our lived realities. Fictional avatars and
virtual pets governed by users in digital spaces, and the wider online cultures
of which they are part, feature strongly in Rogers’s work. She describes
growing up online as an experience of moving from character to character;
beginning with Neopets (a website that allows you to create and care for
virtual pets), onto Furcadia (a role-playing game set in a world of magical
creatures) and then Second Life (an online world in which residents create
virtual representations of themselves). References to these online worlds that
she ‘inhabited’ for long periods of her life appear throughout Bunny’s
practice. Sister Unn’s (2011-12), for
example, comprises an installation of black roses in white vases (a reference
to the black rose items from the world of Neopets) in a storefront in New York
which she describes as a sort of real-world Neopets gallery.[8]
In recent years there has been a
resurgence of interest in Ellen Cantor’s work and her bold representations of
female sexuality and desire, often explored through fairy tales and the
animated Disney characters that were the subject of her childhood fascination.
Her practice was largely driven by issues of reconciliation between the media
narratives we are immersed in as children and the inevitable disappointment and
disillusionment of adult experiences. A vast majority of her work (including
painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and film) explored the relationship
between fictional narratives and lived experience and the role of the female
protagonist as depicted in popular culture.
Often these characters (which she
appropriated as a means of autobiography) were taken from Disney films.
Examples of this include her 1999 film Bambi’s
Beastie Buddies, a series of pencil drawings made in 1996 depicting Snow
White’s sex life, and the painting Untitled
(Alice in Wonderland) (c. 1990), in which Alice is depicted with a menacing
skull looming over her shoulder. Her relationship to cartoon heroines was
complex and respectful; she celebrated Cinderella and Snow White for the
hyper-feminine traits they were given and recast them; “as the women that she
believed they actually were, which departed altogether from their creator’s
intent.”[9]
Describing a 2016 retrospective of Cantor’s work in New York, Laura
McLean-Ferris writes, “It’s an adult world, but one in which agency has been
constructed by a femininity whose sweet, confessional aesthetics mask erotic
powers of a challenging nature.”[10]
The “flatness of possibility” that Hier mentioned in her artist statement
is a result of the unprecedented flow of information through digital channels
in which images are constantly reframed and recontextualised as they are
accessed by users worldwide. These developments are accompanied by a renewed
interest culturally in exploring the experiences of those who have grown up
online. Subjects related to childhood and adolescent experience (especially, as
with the artists mentioned above, from the point of view of female-identified
artists), that have traditionally been absent from art history narratives, are
now becoming more visible within cultural institutions. Although in form and content her works are
decidedly different to the
respective outputs of both Cantor and Rogers, the adult/child and
adult/adolescent dynamics that operate within Hier’s work creates a link
between the three. In various ways, their practices prompt thinking about the
agency of youth (and youthful femininity) and the reframing and repositioning
of disregarded visual systems within art. These ideas percolate subtly around
Hier’s works. In her paintings a clear narrative is never specified so that
readings are left open to the interpretation of the viewer. On the surface,
visual elements ‘talk back’ to one another, framed by titles that take a
similar tone.
While writing this text, a friend
told me a story about woman she knows who one night decided to declare her love
to her boyfriend using a temporary tattoo. Adhering the words ‘I LOVE YOU’
upside down onto his chest while he slept knowing he would look down and see them
in the shower the next morning. The playful form of her admission sounded to me
like a deliberate attempt to undermine the gravity and potential embarrassment
of a declaration to which there is really only one correct reply. In Hier’s
titles, and the cartoonish imagery drawn over her laboriously painted nature
scenery, flippant remarks and swift brush marks seem to act as stand-ins for
something weightier. The wording of titles like Get your tongue out of my mouth because I’m kissing you goodbye,
and Pick me up or let me down belong
to an adolescent
syntax in which, in a pre-emptive act, the urgency of feelings are dismissed in
the same breath as they are expressed.
Charmed at first by the eccentric
characters she meets in Wonderland, Alice becomes increasingly frustrated with
their opaque and unhelpful exchanges. Pleas for advice from the Cheshire Cat
are met with vague and unrelated responses. Similarly when she meets the Hatter
at a tea party later in the story, he subjects her to nonsensical tales and riddles
such as “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”[11] to which
he himself has no answer. Alice’s reasonable behaviour and her inquiring
curiosity about her surroundings are inconsistent with the operating principles
of Wonderland, which is ruled by nonsense. In this context, Alice appears to be
the one who is ‘mad’. Before she departs the tea party, the Hatter offers her a
drink; “Would you like some wine?” and when Alice replies that “Yes…” she would
like some, he responds with “We haven't any and you're too young.”
Claire
Walsh is a curator and writer based in Dublin. She is Assistant Curator at the
Irish Museum of Modern Art and her writing appears in MAP (mapmagazine.co.uk)
and Paper Visual Art journal.
Stephanie Hier, Walnuts and pears you plant for
your heirs, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, 16.06.18 – 21.07.18
[1] Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, (Boston: Branden Books, 1922),
75. First published 1865.
[2] Statement sent to me via email
correspondence with the artist.
[3] From email correspondence with the artist.
[4] Lumi Tan, Be true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you (exhibition
text), NEOCHROME, Turin, Italy, January 26–March 4, 2017.
[5] https://www.tattooarchive.com/history/temporary_tattoos.php, accessed 30 May 2018.
[6] Donna Schons, ‘Bunny Rogers: On the
Unsettling Obsessions of Youth’, Sleek,
May 2017, http://www.sleek-mag.com/2017/05/18/bunny-rogers/, accessed 2 June 2018.
[7] Tan, Be
true to your teeth and they won’t be false to you (exhibition text).
[8] Bunny Rogers, ‘Portfolio: Bunny Rogers’, Frieze, 9 Mar 2016, https://frieze.com/article/portfolio-bunny-rogers,
accessed 2 June 2018.
[9] Johanna Fateman, ‘Scene Stealer: Jonathan
Berger talks to Johanna Fateman about the Art of Ellen Cantor’ Artforum, no. 55 (2 Oct. 2016): 218-223.
[10] Laura McLean-Ferris, ‘Open Failure or
Conditions for a Failed Self: Confession, Narcissism, and Empathy.’ Mousse, no. 55 (October-November 2016):
246-253.
[11] Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: 81.