Angela Willcocks: Walldrawings
Our culture is preoccupied with objects and their consumption. Possessing things, we’re told, enhances the self–and advertising images offer the kind of instantly apparent “perfection” that invites ownership. Artists opposing this ethos often create notably “imperfect” works, seeking to disturb rather than satisfy. And with their references to internal organs, Angela Willcocks’s nine creepy installations at Artemisia almost literally get under one’s skin.
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Weirdness in art can be just plain weird, provocative only for a moment. But the visual contrasts Willcocks creates and the way her pieces both engage and repel prevent simple apprehension. The show also offers some oblique social commentary, referring to silicone implants (one piece includes hand-cast silicone) and artificial body parts (others use rubber or acrylic). “I’m interested in how we’re changing who we are,” Willcocks told me. “I want to create a feeling of beauty from a distance, but then when you get up close, a lot of people are disgusted.” The benzene rings, she said, are meant to suggest “how we change things chemically, beautifying ourselves.” Willcocks, who was born in Australia in 1961 and now lives in Atlanta, uses chitlins–a characteristic southern dish–to reinforce the importance of local culture despite the globalization of our era.
Employing dispersion and a jarring oddity to defeat objectification and complacency, Willcocks ultimately critiques the idea of art as a fixed, limited, or unified entity. With greater subtlety than many installation artists who make a similar point, she prevents the viewer from mentally enclosing each work in a single gestalt.
Delf (the artist says the title is current slang for “self” as well as an acronym for Digitally Engineered Life Form) is at once the most seductive and unsettling piece. A silhouetted figure appears to float in space, drifting and rotating, its arms and legs extending and retracting. Using a photo of his own body, Versteeg wrote a program that created random movements, displayed on a laptop screen covered with blank newsprint, which softens the figure. His weightless dance recalls scuba diving, and the slight but constant variations in movement and position are hypnotic, aspiring to timelessness. A single chair encourages one viewer at a time to sit facing the screen, whose light is transformed by the newsprint into a strangely organic glow brighter at the center because Versteeg made the image lighter there. Behind the screen is a single candle–and it seems that its flame, not thousands of tiny transistors, is what illuminates the silhouette. In Delf Versteeg both utilizes and undercuts the computer, a cultural icon: it clearly creates the movement yet its man-made rectilinearity and cold, even glow are defied by the flickering firelight, which recalls ancient forms of shadow play.
