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Hallwalls

HALLWALLS

Megan Greene: Rappaccini’s Daughter

Megan Greene’s bestiary is a chaotic symphony of forms tightly woven together in a decorative fantasy. She has generated her own invented iconography of grotesque and macabre forms that are handsomely embellished with baroque details.

In his treatise American Technical Sublime, historian David E. Nye states that the beauty perceived in nature and technology will differ: “One person’s sublime may be another’s abomination.” An individual may find grace in nature, in the curve of a leaf; another may find elegance in technology, in the arch of a bridge.

Greene finds the sublime simultaneously in contrasts of nature and technology, primitive and futuristic, feminine and masculine, plant and animal, ritualistic totems and machinery, carnal and ghostly, tribal and rococo. These eclectic elements inspire the genesis of Greene’s metamorphic species.

The title of her exhibit is taken from a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. Rappaccini’s Daughter is the tale of a young man who spies an angelic woman kept in a scientist’s garden surrounded by poisonous plants. The protagonist yearns for this woman, an exquisite but deadly Venus flytrap temptress who has absorbed the garden’s poisons and has herself become toxic.

The narrative is an allegory of lust, temptation, damnation and redemption, the struggle between flesh and spirit. The garden is a metaphor for Eden’s paradise, the woman the forbidden fruit.

Patterns of plant life such as roses and vines appeal to Greene Of particular fascination to her are fragments of the animal kingdom: fur, feathers, leather, claws, horns, shells, teeth. Braids of hair are intermingled with scales, flowers, drapes, mushrooms, military medals, ruffles, tiaras, a pig’s ear.

Greene is fond of the dichotomy inherent in Victorian embellishment and proper etiquette, between the era’s lovely, pretentious artifices and the unsavory underbelly of those pretensions.

Greene’s intricate works are drawn on black paper with colored pencils and gouache. The choice to use black paper was motivated by the emptiness of white paper. For Greene, white represents a challenging blankness, a void to fill, whereas black is a space already filled with potential.

The effect of these curiosities, scaled to human proportions and presented upon a black background, is that of staged set pieces or elaborate adornments set against the velvet of a jeweler’s box.

They resemble teratomas, a type of monstrous ovarian cyst which grows from a mass of cells into an often benign tumor. These bizarre products of asexual reproduction are dermoids, which come complete with a clump of flesh with hair, teeth, nails, occasionally even higher organs such as eyes and extremities.

Greene’s bioluminescent, ectoplasmic phantasms are floating apparitions encapsulated in an undefined space and time. It is uncertain if they are sea creatures swimming through the abyss of a distant past or if they are evolving, Gigeresque, alien space chimeras.

These creatures are full of ambiguities, whether they are alive or dead, displayed like a taxidermist’s specimen. They are in a perpetual state of transformation, their hermaphroditic features enshrouded in mystery.

Kelly Richardson:

The Edge of Everything

Finding strangeness in the commonplace is the theme of Kelly Richardson’s videography. As Ferman Drive rolls along, we patiently watch a fantastical scene from a car window. Richardson has painstakingly used photographs of her childhood home in Ontario, Canada, to blend a rapidly twisting house into a typical suburban street scene. The house spins about as though caught in a tornado, reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, blending dream with reality.

Richardson’s videography is influenced by the work of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s epic, eight-hour movies comprising a single tracking shot in which not much occurs can be viewed a few ways: as a means of producing infinite boredom; as a stoner’s meditative exercise; or as a way to view a film as one would a painting. One can return to the piece on a periodic basis and come away with something different with each viewing.

Richardson invites us to return continually to her trance-like clips. They are pieces that eschew any sense of linear narrative and are hypnotic yet find absurdity in the banal.

Her cinematic works propel us into preposterous situations where we find tranquility in the gently plummeting remains of a flaming meteoroid in Exiles of the Shattered Star. It can also be found in the cacophony of crickets chirping in time to the flickering lights in an empty desert lot in Forest Park, or the frozen moment before the crash in Wagon’s Roll.

There is in her work a sense of an impending disaster or the calmness of a catastrophe that has already come to pass. Her vignettes are always within the realm of possibility.

Her snippets of “hybrid reality” employ time as a protagonist. Action occurs in a perpetual feedback loop. There is no beginning or ending, only a constant middle moment where one is held in a perpetual state of anticipation.