No Names
Exhibition Review
At first glance you might have thought you had come across a run-amuck FAO Schwartz. But Elizabeth Higgins O'Conner's humanoid mutants provide so much more than mere anthropomorphic stuffed-animal grotesquery. Her half-dozen larger-than-life-sized figures assembled out of fabric remnants -- upholstery cushions, quilting, blankets, mattress pads, rags, knitted and crocheted scraps, socks, twine, yarns -- are stitched, bound, stuffed, patched, and padded into powerful statements about the sad state of a wayward civilization. With their outsized heads, distorted limbs, dog/lamb faces, and stooped postures, these creatures exude a palpable pathos. One sits dejectedly with its amputated foot thrust upward. Another, with truncated flipper arms and teddy bear for a foot, gazes down woefully out of huge, soulful eyes. Still another's arms hang limply and uselessly down to its swollen feet, while its sister lacks one hand and has a bulbous mitten fist for the other. The one fully animal figure cowers against a wall like a starved coyote, too weak to resist its fate. Their individual expressions suggest a knowing but passive sentience, made all the more painful by the tenderness of the artist's execution.
While O'Connor's materials remind us of consumerist excess and capitalism's gluttonous waste, what she has constructed out of these materials also brings to mind the potential consequences that lurk just over the horizon. Whether these corrupted beings are the result of a poisoned habitat,
