Sharp Teeth, Long Tongues!
Brassworks Gallery
Weekdays through May 22
Artist Talks Saturday April 18 and Sunday April 19 at 2 p.m.
Ann Vollum’s Sharp Teeth, Long Tongues! is a stunning 79-piece solo retrospective at Brassworks Gallery selected and designed by gallery curator Cheryl Minden.
Some of you learned about Vollum in an earlier Arts Beat: growing up as an English child in post-colonial Africa, time in India and Pakistan, and architectural study in Britain. Now experience Vollum’s visitations from the id.
Start with her delightful wet felt creatures in Whoosh! one of two multi-piece, site-specific, soft sculptures installations of merino wool felt (Wires, embroidery floss and basket cord are also involved). Swim with the swirling, multicolored Octopus’s Garden Under the Sea creatures. But observe the shadows they cast. Something lurking?
Smile and shudder at Vollum’s many Allegories, intricately embroidered fabric pieces punctuated with sparkles, buttons, black lace, wilting flowers.
Vollum’s are not your earnest early American mourning samplers. Here, sweetly frocked little girls or bold little boys play among winged skeletons, gray and green corpses, treacherous dragons. Mythical beasts are smiles on the outside while within ingested victims gush blood, enduring torments worthy of Heironymous Bosch. Giant bats, rat kings, serpents, and creepy-crawlies wait their turn.
Vollum is heir to late medieval hellscapes, memento mori paintings, and outsider artist Henry Darger’s imagery of little girls. She’s heir, too, to dark children’s stories of worldly dangers and treachery—a wolf in disguise, a stepsister forcing a bloodied foot (minus toes) into a glass slipper.
“My works have roots in Grimm’s, in Edward Gorey,” Vollum said. “They’re stories of lost childhood innocence, the sinister underneath, stories that aren’t fully clearcut. Life isn’t always what it seems. Bad things happen.”
Vollum talked about alternating between the sculptures and the allegories.
“The allegories demand tremendous concentration and detail work, each taking months to make,” Vollum said.
“With the sculptures, I’m not thinking as much. It’s more organic–pure creation. Maybe it’s my architectural background–taking the wet felt–flat, ugly stuff–and pounding, pulling, stitching, manipulating it into 3-dimensional shapes.”
Artist Janet Boltax, who is also featured in this month’s issue, bought Vollum’s The Last Laugh right out of a recent show. “I’m drawn to the way her art merges humor with the macabre,” she said.
Save time to reconsider Vollum’s older, beloved Beastly Beasties: A mouse pauses on a crocodile’s back, its long mousy tail forms a whimsical question mark, mocked by the croc’s long tongue stretching backwards. (Crocodile and Mouse, 2010.) Always deft with composition and line, the Beasties prefigure the deliciously darker vision Vollum releases in her more current work.
