CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The mockup of an exaggeratedly feminine bedroom, with its pink walls and fuzzy pink comforter, appears to be a cozy space for a pre-teen girl. But a look inside the open drawer of the nightstand reveals a small diorama of a polluted brownfield site. And the monster under the bed is in the form of a military train set with a desert camouflage engine hauling black tanker cars that circle the room – “a metaphorical military-industrial petrochemical nightmare,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign art professor Laurie Hogin.
“Girlz Bedroom,” a new installation piece by Hogin, is part of an exhibition of her work, “Deep Well,” at the Visual Arts Gallery at Purdue University Fort Wayne. The exhibition runs through March 1 and includes paintings, installation and sculptural pieces – most of which have not been shown before.
Hogin is well-known for her portraits of mutant animals, often set in a poisoned landscape. Her paintings play on the tropes of historical artistic traditions and museum habitat dioramas to offer social commentary on the environment, human relationships, power and politics. The exhibition in Fort Wayne, Indiana, offers a unique opportunity to see her installation and sculptural work, which is not exhibited as often as her paintings, she said.
Her artwork is influenced by the literal and conceptual notions of framing and how it organizes our thoughts and structures our perceptions of the world, through architecture, interior spaces and picture frames; visual culture, from phones and screens to portraiture, advertising, retail and museum displays; and language and taxonomy, Hogin said.
She makes frames for many of her paintings, using them as an exaggerated metaphor. “They are overwrought and maybe a little tacky or a little grotesque. They reiterate the way image frames our understanding of the world,” she said.
Hogin repeatedly uses poison, animals, fungi and cultural definitions of gender as metaphors in her work. The exhibition includes depictions of shelf fungus, which grows on trees. Hogin made resin casts of the fungi and painted them or adorned them with glitter, representing both evidence of rot and an agent of renewal.
“Girlz Bedroom” includes angry pink bunnies whose pink fur has blue tiger stripes – colors that celebrate queerness. They and the “hidden disaster” in the nightstand “are the things the girl occupying the bedroom has to grow up with. The poisoning of the landscape is both a metaphor for being poisoned psychologically in terms of gender roles and expectations, and in the way environmental destruction is framing our health, our lives and our futures,” Hogin said.
She is particularly interested in dioramas, including tabletop dioramas created by hobbyists, museum displays depicting animal habitats and the landscapes used with model railroad and slot car sets. “I’m really interested in practices that look like art but aren’t thought of as art,” such as hobbies, she said.
One of the paintings in the exhibition, created in the style of a diorama, depicts an apocalyptic scene including a toxic waste dump, missiles being fired in the distance and animals that have taken shelter in a pile of rubble. Pieces of the rubble are inscribed with text that is found on the walls of the U.S. Senate building, indicating the institution’s aspirations have been trashed.
In a set of paintings titled “Allegory of Future Seasons,” a pair of brilliantly colored mutant cranes react violently to the poisoning and destruction of their habitats. Hogin’s past work as an environmental activist provides a perspective on the dissonance between how we perceive a natural landscape as pastoral or unspoiled and the reality of problems such as unseen toxins.
The first painting of the pair, “Madness,” depicts a crane either dancing or convulsing in a lush, overgrown landscape filled with pastel mushrooms the colors of Valentine’s Day heart candies. Birds are highly sensitive to neurotoxins, and the crane is responding to substances in its environment that are altering its brain chemistry, Hogin said. In the second painting, “Folly,” the aggressive, frenzied crane is responding to the conditions of a destroyed landscape.