Unnatural History: The Intense And Studied Work Of Brandice Guerra at Zg Gallery
By Carrie McGath in Arts & Entertainment on May 27, 2015 7:30PM
Brandice Guerra is a mad scientist from another world: A place where dark recesses of imagination linger while moaning with confusion and playing with sheer abandon. Her exhibition, Naturalia, on view through May 30th at Zg Gallery, is comprised of work that feverishly beckons thoughts of taxidermic creatures and anatomical studies so prevalent in vitrines in Natural History museums. But here they hang on gallery walls, as naughty little intrusions into the imagination.
Her pieces quote the aesthetic of science textbooks and the banners of carnivals that attract hoards of voyeurs to the strangeness of biology. The beings in her works are confounding mutations while also quaint and Midwestern. Adorning small panels, they are alarming even despite their small scale as they nod to turn-of-the-century sideshows melded with a 21st Century lab gone mad with genetic prowess.
Confounding and lush, this exhibition is truly enchanting. I, Said the Owl is chilling in its depiction of a very human-looking owl hovering expectantly over an grave it has presumably just created. Surrounded by a shadowed forest, the owl practically glows and unmistakably stares the viewer down with eyes Guerra so poignantly rendered. It is an accusatory work with the creature's leering glare while it also gives the sense that the owl is ushering in a peace with mortality or hints at reincarnation.
Two-Headed Hereford (Alva, Oklahoma) evokes that sense of perplexed, hopeless moaning cut with a gallows humor felt throughout the exhibition. So much is happening within this small panel from the look on the animal's faces, to its environment and the impending, nearby doom rolling in with a tornado. It is difficult not to think of the action that will occur outside of this work: The animal stands alone and unguarded even by its landscape conjuring images of death as it is invariably swept away into the atmosphere. But just as the owl in the previous painting hints at rebirth amid death imagery, there resides a nod to notions of blind luck with the twister possibly moving away from the animal and not toward it. The look on the faces of the hereford can be seen as relief or even complete apathy.
Guerra packs so much into each small panel in Naturalia, and not only in her amazing technique and whimsical subject matter and imagery, but also in the philosophical questions each work raises. The works in oil tell a complex tale while her stark and equally-riveting pen, ink and pastel works such as Universal Sign for Choking continue what is at the heart of the show: a profound intrigue and emotion with the deep biology of a nature gone right, wrong or surreal. All of this is accomplished again and again, too, with the proficiency of a geneticist with a skilled hand and a studied ingenuity.