Phantoms and Fragments: The Art of Lana Crooks

“A Memory” is the new exhibition by Lana Crooks at Albuquerque's Stranger Factory Gallery. Crooks’ self-proclaimed “no guilt specimens” engage in wistful mimicry, fashioning the glass imprisonment of bones and insects in lieu of actual cadavers. Grinning feline skulls rest amongst serpent vertebrae, death’s head moths and human jawbones. These textile sculptures divulge the delicate murmurings of a gothic crossroads through every twist of fabric and jeweled embellishment. Hyperrealism is diffused by an echoing softness; we are pulled in by a promise of reality, then spirited away to a curious liminal space. The titular “Memory” serves us well: like memories, Crooks’ pieces are phantoms hinting at a greater whole yet confined to their fragmentary netherworld.

One main thread in Crooks’ work is a coupling of the floral and skeletal. The flowers’ apparent freshness suggests a cycle of death and rebirth, of human remains succumbing to the natural world’s stronghold. However, this imparts a paradox as flowers are classic ephemeral symbols. Many a Vanitas painter paired flowers with bones, asserting 17th-century fables of inevitable decay; hardly a moral warning, Crooks’ pieces are instead elegant plays of form and fragility.

One such piece reveals a silver bell, evading the grasp of bony fingers yet fastened to a wrist with golden rope; the wrist ends in a floral array, the rope arching above to halo the arrangement. The hand’s downward stance is enigmatic as well, evoking perhaps a sailor’s untimely plunge to their ocean sepulcher. The bell reads as a cherished object that the sailor dies to protect, or a sinister talisman that dooms its owners to watery depths. Either way, the bell’s manmade endurance upsets the natural temporality from which it dangles. The question of “precious” thus becomes myriad. While we may treasure a sentimental relic, our own bodies beg a more pressing preservation; as Crooks’ bodily remains are actually fine art objects, they doubly require safekeeping.

In “Forgotten,” a skull is nestled amongst dark leafy offshoots and a descending twirl of ebony hair. Crooks worked her own hair into some accompanying flowers: this bodily reality supports the skull's bodily illusion, tugging her fabrication back to some murky actuality. It is through this hair that Crooks further reinvents the specimen. Lining a scientist’s wall, a row of speared butterflies describes nature’s frigid subjection to posthumous scrutiny. In contrast, Crook’s specimens suggest death yet pulsate with a life-affirming inventiveness. By not simply creating the work but embedding literal parts of herself, Crooks poses the specimen as a unique snapshot of personhood. The hair’s hidden subtlety moreover alludes to a layered mindscape, stressing again the show’s “Memory” namesake. Although parts of ourselves may be forever relegated to memories, Crooks’ work invites a receptive traipse amid nostalgia’s enrapturing caverns.

“A Memory” is at Stranger Factory until July 30th.

Flesh-Slathered Flora: The Historical Contexts of Takato Yamamoto

Contemporary artist Takato Yamamoto imbues his paintings with decorative intricacy, Japanese culture and mysterious eros. Pale, enigmatic youths recline in bondage amongst sculptural ruins or are swallowed by flat tableaus both organic and ornamental; St. Sebastian and androgynous samurais inhabit historical phantasmagorias; homoerotic vampires flash arctic eyes whilst victims dip in rapturous embraces.

Yamamoto’s work represents a particularly-inventive version of Erotic Grotesque, or “Ero Guro.” A Japanese art movement dating back to the 1930’s, Ero Guro involves all of the lurid trappings that its namesake suggests. The movement imparts an ethos of transformation: the “erotic” is transformed by its very coupling with the “grotesque.” Yamamoto manipulates bodies to unfathomable extents, detailing the wings of anatomical phoenixes through an eruption of organs and sinews. More broadly, the principle of transformation is ingrained in his treatment of Aestheticism, gender roles and atmospheric environments; the following will assess these facets through an appraisal of Art Nouveau, Decadence and Expressionist film.

In the Europe of the Fin de siècle (late 19th-century), art gave way to Aestheticism. Armed with the mantra of “art for art’s sake,” the Aestheticists idealized beauty in lieu of moral decrees. Primarily wed to the decorative arts, the Art Nouveau movement elevated simple objects with a florid exquisiteness. More in the realm of fine arts, Alphonse Mucha altered human subjects through this decorative excess alongside nods to Classicism. Garments cling to idealized forms in evocations of Grecian modeling; many figures are allegorical as well, radiating a muse-like mystique amongst lush Pagan wildernesses. Filtered through this enchanting past, beauty becomes an unreachable enigma.

Yamamoto wears his Art Nouveau impressions on his sleeve, saturating backgrounds with labyrinthine patterns to suggest the milieu of a Mucha maiden. Coupled with Yamamoto’s religious and historical subjects, this technique further recalls Mucha’s reverence for a faraway beauty. That being said, both artists are thoroughly situated within their own times: Mucha’s figures populate bourgeois advertisements while Yamamoto’s emanate a Japanese pop-cultural context. These manifold mutations of beauty and history relay Yamamoto’s transfigurative impulses.

Occurring at the same time as Art Nouveau, the Decadent Movement applied Aestheticism to a greater pallet of dark provocation. In a more glaring reflection of Fin de siècle-era social unrest, the Decadents uprooted conservative moral codes through visual debauchery and general misbehavior. With this came the ideal of sensual polarity, often in the mingling of death and sexuality. It is thus no accident that the Ero Guro artists cite Decadence as a clear influence.

Ascribing to both to Decadence and Art Nouveau, Aubrey Beardsley represents a glaring link to Yamamoto. Beardsley’s Decadent edge is perhaps most apparent in his illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s theatrical Salome. In response to the lecherous gaze of her stepfather, Biblical princess Salome weaponizes her femininity by performing a sensuous dance and beheading an imprisoned John the Baptist figure. In “The Dancer’s Reward,” Beardsley depicts the towering Salome clutching the prophet’s freshly-detached head; grotesquery is cast through monochromatic contours, preserving every thrust of a Mucha-esque lavishness. While both artists work within historical contexts to emphasize an enhanced beauty, Beardsley redefines the arena by aestheticizing morbidity. The beautiful becomes repulsive and vice versa, resulting in a typically-Decadent concoction.

Yamamoto’s own Salome paintings cement his debt to Beardsley. In one such work, a nude Salome kisses John the Baptist’s head against a red lunar backdrop. While her feminine body makes her initially vulnerable to the male gaze, Salome obtains an androgynous agency by rerouting that gaze in her favor. Since the captive John the Baptist cannot subject Salome to the same masculine command as her stepfather, she constructs him as her own object of desire and eventual victim. In reflecting male anxiety around the relatively-more empowered Fin de siècle woman, this femme-fatale Salome exemplifies a Decadent subversion of Victorian gender roles. Yamamoto thus conjures this feminine activity to stress his insurgent lineage.

A final feature of Yamamoto’s work is his Expressionist treatment of environments. Expressionist art relies on mood to create meaning, refuting naturalism for subjectivity. While a fine artist manipulates various elements to contrive a product, this allover attention to detail is perhaps more exaggerated in cinema. In Robert Wiene’s 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, theatrical set pieces comprise an entirely-invented world where every jutting diagonal and angular alleyway serve an overbearing anxiety. With an utter disavowal of naturalism, Caligari represents Expressionism’s precipice. Yamamoto similarly crafts a fully-realized fiction; he entraps subjects in a sleep-paralysis of full moons and floral ribcages, nestling childhood relics alongside lurking eyeballs and seminal ectoplasm. Death and serenity are delicate bedfellows, beckoning viewers to a chasm both nostalgic and foreboding.

To further assess Expressionism’s mutative channels, we turn to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film Vampyr. Near the end, a hallucinatory scene follows the protagonist’s perspective from inside a coffin. Death becomes the subtext through which a setting is filtered: trees and houses are newly unsettling, slinking in low-angles past the protagonist’s trance. In Yamamoto’s “Loved by the Death God,” a blank-faced schoolgirl stares ahead as a skeleton drapes behind her; a blunt delivery of Yamamoto’s own morbid filter, the same skeleton may as well be hidden in Vampyr’s coffin-bound visions. While a film’s meaning relies on the adjacency of disparate shots, a singular painting is self-contained. Vampyr’s otherwise mundane point-of-view scenes gain their Expressionist lens through the offscreen coffin’s contextual padding; by contrast, Yamamoto’s work arches again towards Caligari’s allover Expressionism. Yamamoto makes use of coffins as well: cadaverous debris leave mere faces uncovered, redefining the coffin as organic overgrowth. The line between figure and environment becomes increasingly vague, emphasizing Yamamoto’s indivisible atmospheres.

Takato Yamamoto creates unique, historically-conscious art within the Erotic Grotesque tradition.Yamamoto’s work can be described through the three historical modalities of Art Nouveau, Decadence and Expressionist film. These facets each reflect an Ero Guro ethos of transformation: the first pertains to shifting dialogues around beauty and the past, the second to similarly-shifting dialogues with a dark androgynous edge, and the third to reinventions of setting through mood. Yamamoto’s paintings thus blossom like so many flesh-slathered roses, mysteriously sentient in their tragic abyss.