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Stuck Together Repurposes And Becomes Richly Subversive
at Track 16 (through May 11)
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Stuck Together is a conjoining of images, all fascinating, most anthropomorphic. The visually rich exhibition re-purposes images through collage, assemblage, and a sometimes-surreal approach to turning the ordinary into extraordinary. There’s a touch of whimsy, however dark, in the work of all three LA-based artists exhibiting: Marsian De Lellis, Simone Gad, and Debra Broz. Each artist is reinventing the objects and images they present, bringing them new life, renewal, and a gloriously subversive yet redemptive turn.
De Lellis’ work changes the first gallery space into a large-scale installation that is a quilt of dolls — a thousand of them in fact, many damaged, worn, frail, altered — and reminiscent of the Skin Horse in the classic children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, who speaks of growing shabby from being loved. Once loved, these dolls have been discarded, only to come back in De Lellis’ art and imagination to a new, meaningful narrative space.
Naturally highly textured, the work brings the viewer into a play on identity, repetition, and life after, if not death, decay. De Lellis describes the decaying handmade dolls from their (In)/Animate Objects collection as being displayed in three formats, “clustered on a…
