CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Artist Guen Montgomery is interested in how we acquire and dispose of possessions. “Junk Drawer,” an exhibition of work by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign art professor, features prints that Montgomery made from fur pelts and family clothing as a meditation on the conflict between our material culture and our animal biology.
“Junk Drawer” opened March 18 at the University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery and runs through April 11.
During the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, Montgomery began documenting the items in her junk drawer and asking others to do the same. The project was a metaphor for the anxiety of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests happening at the time, as well as events in her personal life – dealing with infertility and in vitro fertilization treatments and her mother’s serious illness.
“I was feeling deeply lonely, with periods of hopelessness. It echoed how the country was feeling more largely, like we were all scrambled and trying to get ourselves back together,” Montgomery said. “I had a huge collection of weird medical-adjacent paraphernalia that ended up in places I wouldn’t expect. I would open a drawer in the kitchen and be put back in that mental space. The objects didn’t really have a home, just like those feelings bouncing around.”
Her pregnancy and her mother’s illness “made me feel much more anchored in my animal body than I ever felt before,” she said.
At the same time, she was reading the novel “Grendel,” a sympathetic retelling of “Beowulf.” That led her to work with fur pelts, cutting and sewing them and then applying ink directly onto the fur and printing the images on paper and fabric. “Grendel’s Mother” features the image of a furry creature on all fours.
“I love the way fur reproduces when it’s printed. There’s an incredible amount of detail that the print is able to pick up that our eyes might miss or blur into one generalized thing. It allows us to see each hair and reminds me of all the unseen things or missed things,” Montgomery said.
In the exhibition, the fur pelt works are paired with prints she previously made from family garments, such as her grandmother’s slip and housedresses.
“We have great material wealth. Increasingly, a lot of us feel like we have a love/hate relationship with the objects in our lives, so many of which we have outgrown, or they don’t have a utilitarian value or we’re not sure what they were for in the first place. There’s a discomfort with letting it go that’s an echo of strong psychological anxiety about the future,” she said.
The clothing prints represent a desire to hold onto the memory of a person, even though the person is not located in the object, Montgomery said. She said she identifies her grandmother with her housedresses, utilitarian clothing items that were worn only in a personal space. The prints also reflect her interest in gender, including her identity as a lesbian and how the women in her Appalachian family expressed femininity. She said they play on the archetypes of femininity and also speak to queerness.
The exhibition includes a series of ceramic wigs.
“They are really performative objects inspired by people I know who would wear a coiffed wig to keep from having to deal with their own hair. It’s a kind of armor or regalia you put on to say something about yourself to the world,” Montgomery said.
They also represent the rigidity of gender roles and the send-up of gender roles that is drag, she said.
A series of objects titled “Kit for a Human Woman” includes ceramic ponytails that were inspired by the Betty and Veronica comic strips and the femininity they portrayed; a giant hairclip modeled after the clips Montgomery’s mother used to style her hair; and a pillbox hat decorated with a felted shrew.
Montgomery said she is moving to creating more 3-D objects and sculptural work, which she’ll continue at a residency this summer at Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee.