The Things We Do
At the Simon Fraser University Gallery until June 30

Talking hands, copulating frogs, a pile of white bananas: all contribute to an unexpected little group show at the Simon Fraser University Gallery.

Hybridity and transgression are both metaphors and strategies. This is immediately evident in Marcia Pitch’s mixed-media installation, Mongrel. It consists of some 90 small and surreal assemblages, mounted across two walls of the gallery, each composed of two or more disjunct elements. Most of the components have been harvested from worn and discarded toys and plastic figurines, with the addition of grungy bits of fur, feathers, and fabric. The mutant creatures range from a plastic deer with a bird’s head to a baby doll’s head mounted on hairy tarantula legs to a little white lamb surmounted by a big black rat. Some are sweetly funny (a figure with a golf ball for a head, toy tires for eyes, and a miniature flowerpot for a hat) and some are horror-movie creepy (a dog’s body with a segmented worm for a face and big dangling eyeballs).

Pitch’s assemblages are reminiscent of those by Korean-Brazilian artist Sang Won Sung, who exhibited his hybridized little plastic sculptures at Art Beatus a few years ago. However, Pitch’s use of found rather than new materials addresses the vast waste associated with global overconsumption. Her forms also trigger thoughts about body politics, cultural migration, genetic manipulation, and what might be a drastically accelerated pace of evolution shaped by pollution and climate change. Imagine, for instance, an aquatic creature whose gills process oil instead of water.

Mutant life forms also inhabit Hand gLove, a short piece of animation by Karen Ostrom. Here, two creatures, each composed of a human hand and an upper body that looks part geoduck, part condom, enact a ritual of arousal, consummation, and release. It’s absurd and strangely compelling—as if we were watching the reproductive habits of some newly discovered life form. Human hands, with the addition of rhinestone “eyes”, also enact a little soap opera of romantic dissolution—and disillusion—in Cindy Loehr’s Colloquy. And cast human hands and forearms, one of them making a gesture of, uh, dismissal, complement a turdlike pile of Hydrostone bananas in Elizabeth Zvonar’s Waxing Poetic, Bullshit & Bananas. In Helen Eady’s Animal Acts, 144 small paintings, installed in a wall-filling grid, depict a Discovery Channel world of animals—lions, tigers, anteaters, otters, sea horses, bats, bison, chipmunks—either mating or fighting. Or both.

Looked at together, the works in this show do pose a metaphysical question, along the lines of “What is it that we are?” And a big part of the answer that these artists also offer is, “Complex, multifaceted, and often absurd sexual beings.” Fidgety hybrids crossing boundaries that are both physical and psychological, in order to get with each other. Transgression is indeed one of The Things We Do.