Taking the fantastic to another level

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

•	'Flapdoodle Flimflam Flummadidle': Mixed-Media Nonsense May Izumi and Lori Uyehara 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays Through July 2 bibelot gallery 738-0368

May Izumi and Lori Uyehara have chemistry. Their works resonate together — low notes and high notes, grotesque and exquisite, freaky and fanciful. These opposing forces blessed by a similar sense of humor create a tension between their works that plays bittersweet havoc with the senses.

The 84 pieces in the exhibit are sculptures and paintings by both artists. Not all the work is new, but each artist challenged herself to create new works. This stretching-as-an-artist concept is not new to these two friends, who met during the course of last year's "Multiple Personalities" exhibit at the Academy Art Center. That sculptural exhibit involved eight artists and three years of change while they explored and experienced the complexities of life.

Although Izumi admits she has very little training as a painter, in this show it is clear that what she lacks in technique she makes up for in imagination. She has also shifted from her neutral-toned figures to ones that have elements of bright colors. Uyehara's experiments — adding paper clay to her wood sculptures — have given them more color as well and a delightful figurative attribute. Both artists have transformed their own nonsense into substance.

Their collaborative effort, a pair of mixed-media figures titled "Between Twilight and Sunset," appear as if ready for a journey, ready for their amazing tale to begin.

Uyehara's night figure has three different wood legs (two layered in different colored woods and one curvy) and wood branches with birds on the sides of a body painted the color of twilight (stars included). The white moon face (with opaque glass star beads) and light blue breasts are made of paper clay.

Izumi's paper clay day figure is a sandy-colored camel, bright and wide-awake with an open eye on its hump. Branches and birds grow out of this hill-like hump. A toucan rests on its head. A rope bridge with small skulls underneath it connects the two figures.

"There is a bridge between night and day," says Izumi. "The skulls represent people, the humanity that bridges that gap. Some people call death a passing into twilight or going into the night."

Tiny and tough, Izumi's eight, two-inch long, genetically modified vegetable sculptures have vegetable bodies with the heads of rabbits and cats. Likewise, Uyehara's six pocket-art paintings are mounted inside tin breath-mint containers.

While Uyehara's acrylic paintings reveal her love of birds and dogs, Izumi's paintings expose her fascination with the morally abhorrent freak shows of the past, where people were displayed as exhibits in a museum. Her paintings, although based on photos of real people, are not straight portraits. "The Hairy Girl Contemplates Escaping into the Background" depicts a woman with congenital hypertrichosis, a disease that causes excessive facial hair.

"They used to show people with this disease on exhibit in a side show as a missing link — wild girl of Borneo, things like that," says Izumi. "Her skirt is lifted up to show that she is not a man. At the turn of the last century, a woman would never do that in public. But people were paying to see that she wasn't a man. Here, the background is the backdrop of the theater. The grass is starting to creep out of the backdrop and leach into her real world. It is hard when you are working in that type of environment to separate what is real from what is not, who you really are, who other people think you are or whom they think you should be."

"Bad Baby Ointment" is a picture of a barebacked woman. If you tilt the picture or move your head you can see the outline of a transparent crying baby on her back. This piece was inspired by one of the most infamous books ever written, the "Mallius Mallificarum" or "Witches Hammer" (1486). The book was a guidebook for Inquisition prosecutors, aiding them and their ilk in the identification, prosecution and dispatching of witches for 250 years. It also helped to validate the Inquisition itself and led to the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

"One of the things witches supposedly did, according to the book," says Izumi, "was kidnap babies and make ointment out of them so they could fly and consort with Satan. I wanted to do something with this woman's back, a branding. Once you see the baby's face, it is always there."

Many of Izumi's figurative sculptures were inspired by exhibits in the Bartholomew's Fair in London during the 1800s, where one could view living curiosities such as pinhead women, three-headed dogs, conjoined cat girls, mermaids and monkeys with parasitic twins. Her series of Infanta sculptures all feature cage-like farthingale skirts that either have flames bursting out of them or four legs underneath them.

Uyehara's nine free-hanging sculptures are witty renditions of puppet-like forms integrating natural wood elements with painted sections, wire and beads. "Earth and Sky," a free-standing sculpture, includes wood, paper clay deer heads and a sky-painted blown-out duck egg.

She has also included a dozen wooden wands in the show made out of various pieced and carved woods—to bring on the magic.

Her painting "The Promise" is a small treasure. The eggs inside the nest of this composition glow with life.

In this exhibit, Izumi and Uyehara engage our curiosity and coerce us into suspending our judgment. In that space, we are encouraged yet also embarrassed by our humanness.

"You need to have dark and light," says Izumi "and an interplay between the two, or else it isn't interesting."