Theatrical Obsessions
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At The William D. Cannon Art Gallery
Sponsored by City of
Carlsbad, CA. May - 2002
The body seeks order - it cannot help it. Chaos is
unsettling, syncopated, unresolved. Order sooths. It unruffles,
detangles, harmonizes. Seal up the gaping holes, knots the loose ends. In
what form of order, though, is there not some madness? And in every chaos
can one find some sense, some naturalness or reason, some reassuring balm?
Chaos
. . . . . . . Order.
Madness
. . . . .
Brilliance.
Fragility . . . . .
Strength.
Chance . . . . . . .
Choice.
Within these dualities, Poupee Boccaccio locates a truth resonant
with experience as she knows it. A truth in the vacillation, in the
simultaneity. There is a restlessness to her work, an edgy yearning as
layer surmounts layer, image crowds image. But within the work there is
also the grid, the sober alignment of verticals and horizontals. Neat
rows. Regular repetitions.
Boccaccio does not attempt to
reconcile opposites as much as she defines a space where both can operate
freely, where neither defeats the other but together they sustain an
equilibrium, at once tense - and yet serene.
Over and over, the face of
young, dark-eyed Catherine Boccaccio appears in these collages and shadowboxes.
She has a lovely, entrancing demeanor, whether dressed in a solemn white
confirmation outfit or more playfully costumed as a gypsy or and angel.
Her face in these pictures is one her sister Poupee never knew - one of
innocence , purity, promise. By the time Poupee was born, Catherine was
15, and a hostage to the disease of schizophrenia. Her hallucinations
played themselves out in the bedroom that the girls shared.
In the eyes
of young Poupee, the trauma of Catherine's condition seemed to fuse with the
drama of it. Life itself assumed a fundamental theatricality. Going
into show business as a singer and actress felt, she says, like a natural
extension of her childhood experiences. Performing granted her another
identity. It transported her to a different place. I allowed her to
reinvent herself continually, to echo and to depart her sister.
Madness
. . . . . . Brilliance.
Chance
. . . . . . . Choice.
In 1980,
well-established with her own nightclub act and numerous film and television
credits, Boccaccio opted to return to school, this time to study art. (Her
prior degree was in romance languages.) At the Otis Art Institute of
Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, she studied under
Emerson Woelffer, Tom Wudl, Peter Shelton and Betye Saar, Saar's impact being
the most pronounced and enduring. Beginning as both a painter and an
assemblage artist, her "love of materials won out," she says, and she has worked
since in sculpture, collage and installation. She has encased standing
chess pieces - each one part angel, part house - in shimmering crusts of glass.
She has filled a case with an array of beetles, symbols of renewal, some
iridescent, all grotesque and exquisite. Like Saar, she gravitates toward
objects charged with personal meaning, an textures defined by the use of the
hand.
Postage stamps from Italy, for instance, the country
of her father's birth, line the interior of an assemblage piece called "The
Ecuadorian Lottery for Mother Nature." One side of the open case is
papered with letters her father
wrote, the Italian stamps, and Mexico loteria
cards with images of skulls and hearts. On the other side of the case is a
crudely fashioned torso of a woman, inset with green beetles and coiled in
copper wire. On her abdomen rests a small roulette wheel. Nail and
pins pierce her heart. The suitcase Boccaccio used to contain these
objects and memories is the very one carried by her father to Ecuador, where he
met her mother, and together they had Catherine.
Catherine's
face doesn't appear here as it does in so many other works, but her presence,
whether explicit or implicit, suffuses Boccaccio's aesthetic. To try to
make sense of Catherine's condition, their mother sought guidance in palmistry
and astrology. Their father turned to the traditions of Catholicism.
Boccaccio extracts symbols from both of these modes of understanding reality -
and others - and interlaces them in her work. Palmistry diagrams overlap
with crosses, evil eyes hover around tiny milagros, knelt in prayer. What
drives each of these beliefs and practices is the craving for order - a sensible
explanation, a system that might provide structure within the chaos, and
indicator to deflect the fear that only chance, free of method, might be
steering.
Everything, though, in a world of dualities,
contains its opposite. Randomness does yield patterns. Systems do
yield to luck. These are not just discrete objects that Boccaccio
fashions, but microcosms of her world, the world at large, where games and magic
coexist with rational causality. Boccaccio immerses us in it. Within
her densely layered collages and assemblages, the surfaces covered edge to edge,
symbols of play (tic tac toe grids and hopscotch squares) overlap with numerical
patterns and emblems of good fortune (a tooth, a wishbone). The different
fields o inquiry compete for attention in the clamor. Varying modes if
action co-conspire.
"Ritual, magic, theater and
religion are difficult to distinguish from each other - they are all landmarks
people use to find their bearing in a chaotic universe," Boccaccio has
written. The layering of symbol upon symbol "is a metaphor for each
person's struggle towards his own personal truth."
Many
years ago, when moving Catherine into a nursing facility, Poupee came across
years' worth of notebooks her sister had compiled, each containing page
after page of numerical sequences. Perhaps the number represented
mathematical equations, perhaps a private code. Maybe they were simply a
form of babbling, on paper - but maybe not. Some hint of brilliance
lurked within the madness of the ritualistic repetition, and for Boccaccio, the
notebooks became emblematic of more than just her sister's condition. They rhythmically echo my own obsessiveness as an artist, and nature's
repetitive but waning heartbeat, and man's destructive countdown in the name of
progress," she wrote in the statement for one of her shows.
For
the installation, "La Juala (The Cage)," Boccaccio recreated Catherine's
bedroom, using Xeroxed pages from the notebooks to sheathe every surface - the
walls, floor, dresser, rocking horse, doll. Even the bedding bears those
strings of numbers, running across reproductions of Catherine's face.
Though the space us a sterile white, the room feels out of control, buzzing with
manic energy. The patterning overwhelms, offering no respite. It
entraps, like a cage. Coinciding with this is the still harmony of
Boccaccio's shadowbox cases that pair photographs of Catherine with rows of
butterflies. A contained order reigns here, a sense of balance,
correspondence. Meticulously structured reliquaries, the cases contain
black and white photo transparencies of Catherine (ever in costume) in
tight, even rows on one side, and an equally careful alignment of butterfly
specimens on the other, all against the background of those
numbers, endless
streaming. The delicacy of both the girl and the butterflies registers
immediately, reinforced by their common translucency, which gives them both a
fragile, almost ephemeral quality. Both, though, possess an obvious
tenacity. The pairing is utterly--each is a rare and endangered beauty,
frozen in prime.
Poupee Boccaccio practices an obsessive
magic, summoning beauty from pain, transcendence from things earthly and
physical. When art works, she says, it's like a séance. It's a form
of passage from one place to another, out of one identity and into another.
It's theater, a ruthless drama and an indulgent fantasy, set with the artifacts
of experience. And it's everyday life, which is theater at its best and
most mysterious.
Written by: Leah Ollman (Los Angeles Times) for Theatrical Obsessions.
