When some vapid steel balloons sculpted by Pennsylvania-born artist Jeff Koons sell for $23.4 million, people are right to call contemporary art “slick.”
But for German conceptual artist Heide Hatry, slick means gritty, confrontational, even creepy. It also means oil spill. In her show at Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, “Imagine It Thick In Your Own Hair,” the works on display are DOA – in a good way.
With the BP calamity as her motivation, Hatry has covered dead animals in a horrible cocoon of black viscosity. She wants people to see up close how the spill in the Gulf of Mexico has doomed and destroyed wildlife.
“The show is intended to evoke the tragedy being visited upon earth and to motivate people to help,” said Hatry. “It is difficult to not look away when you see an actual animal suffering. I want to demand awareness by putting the harsh truth directly in front of the viewer, unmitigated by distance.”
So forget traditional oil-on-canvas; try crude oil poured over dead birds, an opossum and two rats – critters the artist finds as road kill and freezes. She then performs taxidermy and goes to work making her reproachful creations.
Cute reborn trophies these are not. One sculpture looks like miniature dinosaur skeletons in a tar pit. Most are black, mixed-media works using sand, straw, feathers, partial rodent parts. They are not meant to be easy to look at.
No animals were harmed before they were given a second chance in Hatry’s studio. Not so for the real wildlife down in the Gulf.
<a href="http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1270007&srvc=rsstag:news.google.com,2005:cluster=http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1270007″>Artist puts tragedy of Gulf oil spill on display
