Materia Prima
In fact, somewhere in the middle of this hour-long solo piece you begin to see life-changing profundities in images of baby poop. These come after you’ve watched Shaw prowl about her makeshift kitchen late at night, traumatized by her young daughter’s terror at her own bowel movements. The beleaguered Shaw’s terry-cloth robe, unstyled clump of hair, and darkly circled eyes make her look more like a torture victim than a suburban mother of three. Shaw isn’t content to settle for the Oprah-fied version of the motherhood battle: it’s tough, but isn’t it all worthwhile when you stare into those big, smiling eyes? Instead she pushes her saga into a minefield of myth and psychosis. The battle being waged here is for her soul, a battle she’s clearly losing–a struggle paralleled in her obsessive viewings of The Exorcist on late-night television. In contrast to our culture’s expectations, she dares to put her own life on an equal footing with her child’s. In her darkest moments, she even seems ready to tear the kid to shreds if it will restore some sense of her independence.
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The things that need to be transmuted in Shaw’s life are many: her child, her imagination, an oversize turd. In one of the evening’s more tantalizing moments, she suggests that the very piece she’s performing is in desperate need of transformation. Taking a rare moment to reflect upon the daily drudgery of motherhood, she laments that surely she’s not creating an entire work out of such banality. In a crushing moment, the artist gives up on the material she’s trying to fashion into art.
