LACMA

149 CARLEE FERNANDEZ The photographer, like the taxidermist, attempts to hold captive a fleeting sign of existence; even the photo shoot, with its temporary deadening of the subject before the camera, evokes the hunting and mounting of animals. Carlee Fernandez has long been interested in challenging the supposedly static form. Her preoccupations with taxidermy as sculptural form, photographic studies of her own investigations with these deadweight materials, and her most recent "mounting" of photosculp- tural forms all together tell an affecting tale, one that takes up (in her own words) "natural beauty, spatial environments, and dark humor." In her early work, made during and shortly after her Masters of Fine Arts at Claremont Graduate University, she used taxidermy animals as zoological cut-ups. Her initial use of taxidermy emerged from her curiosity with the transmogrification of animal to hollow form. Fernandez was drawn to the "negative space" of that form and wanted to provide a supplement—perhaps to make the entity whole again, even if perversely signaling a plot against nature. In unorthodox sculptures such as Hugo Parlier (2001), the unwieldy head of a rhinoceros is adjoined to a stepladder. Although the sources are incongruent, Fernandez takes pains to upholster the ladder in rhinoceros skin to produce the uncanny appearance of a complete biolog- ical transference. In Rat with Grapes (2002), the bounty found in the mannerist paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo gets plopped in the petri dish of a genetics lab. Conceptual links abound, such as the wrestling with morphology and the staging of a "corporeal comedy" (to borrow Robert Storr's description of Franz West's sculptures). In Bear Studies (2004), Fernandez places her own body into the combi- natory process. Although Fernandez uses "studies" to invoke the methodologies of behavioral science and borrows poses from wildlife photography, the element of slapstick—or "corporeal comedy"—nudges the viewer out of too deep a descent into pseudoscience. Art historian and curator Mark Godfrey has discussed a recent tendency of the photosculptural work as a witness to a sculptural act. Fernandez does not consider the elements of her 2006 series Man to be performance documents, but rather the photosculptural work itself. Man is a series of self-portraits of Fernandez as, and in, photosculptural form. In these works, she holds photographs of artists in her masculine pantheon—whether her German shepherd, artist Franz West, artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, or filmmaker Werner Herzog. Fernandez props the blown-up photographs on her body, literally supporting each image as pedestal, but at times she coyly handles the photo surrogates for her ideal—man—as a diminutive puppet or doll. Man can be read as an homage to Franz West's passtück (adaptive) sculptures, which were meant to be grasped, cuddled, or interacted with in any way seen fit—but in this case, it is the artist's body that stretches and adapts. An aspect of masquerade also pervades the photographs, as Fernandez assumes the macho rock 'n' roll stances of heavy-metal musicians Dave Mustaine and Bruce Dickinson. In contrast to the flamboyant masculinity of the rock stars, Man originally began as a small tribute to the artist's father, a geologist. The work that initiated the series features Fernandez in (uncanny) drag as her father. Squat floor sculptures and tentacled wall forms made of amethyst, resin, and coral were originally shown along with the photographs. In this associa- tive play, the materials of her father's profession merge with fabrics, ribbons, and decorative elements. In these humorous, dolled-up crustacean forms, we find yet another provocative instance of nature and nurture, the collision of the artist's fascination with both natural science and portraiture. — RITA GONZALEZ

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