Renee Stout
Renee Stout and Emily Counts both convey a sense of unease, partly because of their work’s disturbing content, but mostly because the environments they create blur the boundaries between art and life. Some of Stout’s 31 pieces at DePaul University Art Gallery (a smaller version of a touring retrospective organized by the Belger Arts Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City) are grouped into installations inspired by characters she invented, based in part on African-American folklore.
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It’s hard not to chuckle at Stout’s intentionally exaggerated optimistic messages, yet the power of the work comes from her obvious respect for the beliefs underlying them. As a young painter Stout was influenced by photo-realism, and she did trompe l’oeil still lifes while a student at Carnegie Mellon University. The visual flair of Fatima’s Sign, which resembles a piece of folk art, may reflect her experience painting thrift store signs. There’s an appealing naivete to her lettering, her layout, her use of bright colors; the sincerity of this piece of “advertising” seems anachronistic in light of the cynical calculation of mass-media advertising today.
Stout offers explicit political commentary in one group of works that includes Carpetbagger Politician Goes for Free Ride on Homeless Woman (1998), a sculpture of a man in a shopping cart cluttered with possessions, mostly food and rags. Sewn onto his clothing is a label reading “Lauch Faircloth,” the name of an ultraconservative senator from North Carolina who opposed voting rights for D.C. residents. The man and the objects are mostly dark, making the piece hard to see–and echoing the invisibility of the homeless. At the same time, this three-dimensional sculpture composed of actual objects directly invokes the existence of the poor and ironically, almost surreally, casts Faircloth as one of them.
Among the small, relatively flat dioramas, halfway between paintings and sculptures, is one showing cute cats, one of which has stripes that continue onto the wallpaper behind it. In another diorama a giant pink bunny wearing a disturbed look sits in a wallpapered room with a bed on the right–and trees on the left, bringing the bunny’s “real world” indoors. In another, a rainbow arches over a dog; chained to a tree, it seems to strain after a large but frightened-looking white bunny. Contrasting the reality of animals with their saccharine representations in popular culture, Counts positions a giant polar bear at the show’s entrance, its cotton-candy fur in sharp contrast with the blood on its teeth. A sculpture of a seal rests limply on the striped bedspread, a bloody gash near its throat. The show’s great strength is the surprising way Counts’s two motifs–the overdone hothouse atmosphere and the animals-as-killers theme–meld, as if a kind of violence were inherent in decorative excess.
