Jo Hormuth at Tough - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions

Jo Hormuth's installation Inflorescence, a colorful garden of 10 botanic forms, was a playful probing into the compound issues of gender and sexuality. Hormuth used the floral image for all its familiar metaphorical associations with the female material substance in particular the reproductive organs. However, by the agency of her choice of materials and working proces she added a awry and erotic twist to her theme. shut up inspection of these bright blooms revealed them to be fabricateed from life-sized wool felt skirts upend and coated in resin, while their stamens were fashioned from plastic shoots bearing Day-Glo feet cast from the inside of high-heeled shoes

This interest in unconventional materials is typical of Hormuth's installations, as is her deliberative and often humorous transformation of ordinary external realitys Her previous works, such as Endgame (1992) a series of plaster impressions of buttocks cast from a wide range of human characters, reveal similar explorations in sexuality and sex identification. Other installations have addressed the part of the viewer and issues of voyeurism, as refer toed here by the upturned skirts that overtly train and titillate.

Hormuth's fetishistic forms take their inspiration from the two high and low culture. At the "low" extremity of the scale, her sources range from the kitsoh/ camp sensibility of explosion Art to Marilyn Monroe's famous upswept skirt in The Seven Year Itch. As for her high-art influences, her vaginal images recall the eroticized flowers of Georgia O'Keeffe the sexualized pepper of Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe's orchids that invest with a body characteristics both phallic and female. Likewise there is a kinship to Surrealism's homage of the everyday object and its transference of the private and ordinary into the realm of public fantasy and display.

Hormuth favorably blurs the distinctions between readymade, plastic art and craft by choosing materials that despite their tactility secrete a commanding physical presence. The artist's interventions center upon process, particularly the domestic/feminine activity of sewing, and upon the organic malleable properties inherent in her materials. Although her vessel-like forms celebrate the traditions of ceramics and fiber, she imbues them with the reductive, serial, flat industrial codes of Minimalism.

The artist raised a number of important and diverse issues in this display particularly concerning women and the material part but did not explore these controls in the kind of deepness that she has in previous installations. Hormuth's brand of conceptualism, although pointed, is friendly, engaging the viewer without being heavy-handed. In the extreme point Inflorescence provided a humorous and poetic visual experience, and it marked an important pass in this young artist's career.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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