FLASH ART, March - April 1999~Michael Cohen

MARNIE WEBER
Jessica Fredericks Gallery

Marnie Weber’s hallucinatory photomontages tell the tale of the “Unlovables,” a group of female prisoners banished to a barren waste-land where they mingle and transform into rodents and rabbits – nature’s unlovables. The collages depict proliferating female nudes, cut from Japanese pornography, that bloom from desert cacti like butterflies and larvae. Uncanny figures, montaged with rodent and owl heads, they haunt a bleak vista of abandoned campers, bleached rocks, and spiny foliage. Within this surreal landscape, Weber’s Femme Rodentia struggle to create a personal myth of feminine community, where they can roam free.

The transformation from cunt to cute parodies cultural myths which define femininity as weakness and passivity, from the brothers Grimm to Disney and, of course, pornography. For Weber, these women are gazed at but not loved, so she reinserts them into a stark yet bucolic new landscape to bring them hope. Rather than fashion fresh narratives or pornographic images, Weber re-uses the old because this remelding of a given language is closer to what she sees as the feminine position.

Taking lost children back to shoddy shangri-la bears out and mocks the hippie ethos which lies at the heart of California culture. The show advocates power and commitment, but the cacti sprouting limbs and leather restraints attest to a more realistic notion of transformation as beautiful pain. If the body cannot literally be changed, its mutation can act as a metaphor for a physique that is not simply gazed at and obedient.

Weber’s fractured fables are genuinely bizarre. The idiosyncrasies dwelling in her oeuvre place it firmly within the free explorations of meaning, perversion and pop which were once fostered in the now-fashionable Los Angeles art scene’s previous obscurity. If you’re looking for real L.A. art, this is it.