Pudzis’s works are on display at the Dittmar Gallery in Norris. Photo courtesy of Allison Putnam.
The bunnies, squirrels and birds in Brandy Pudzis’s art might be characters from a Peter Rabbit tale. Except that the Chicago-area artist paints them as bloody, decapitated, horny or dead: Her “spring occurrence 2″ depicts two squirrels descending upon a bunny’s severed head, its mouth agape and its eyes wide with fear.
“Why is she killing Daisy?” asked Pudzis’s cousin, six-year-old Joey Giovannetti, at the opening reception of the Norris exhibit showcasing the work of Pudzis and artist Marcy Sperry. Daisy, the boy explained, is Pudzis’s pet rabbit.
Marcy Sperry, the second Chicago-area artist in Dittmar’s new exhibit, excels at New Age quilting. But in her work with altered clothing, “Domestic Sunshine,” there’s something more afoot than just eye candy. Consider the disturbing “Muscle Baby” series: four zip-up toddler sleepers have been covered with glossy magazine cutouts of tiny muscle pieces — a bicep here, pectorals there — that look inhuman out of their normal bodily context.
Sperry said she was inspired to make the “Muscle Baby” series by the story of Richard Sandrak, a boy who acquired the ripped physique of a full-grown man before age 10. The effect of the series is “putting adult desires, pathological desires, on the shoulders of children.”
For these and other clothing pieces in the exhibit, the original fabric manages to peek through the cracks between beads, stitches and patches, and the clothing interior usually remains as it was pre-alteration.
Sperry seems to say, Whatever you are, you (or someone else) can stitch over it, but you can’t get rid of it.
In Pudzis’s “invasion,” a veiny black penis stands erect atop a military tank pursuing a screaming bunny across bloodied grass. Spurting droplets of what could be sperm or tears or little ghosts, the penis seems both dangerous and desperate. The bunny is terrified.
“I know what that black thing is,” Giovannetti said mischievously. Weinberg junior Jenn Lee, who co-curated the exhibit at Norris’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery with Weinberg sophomore Allison Putnam and head curator Weinberg senior Mandy Klearman, asked him knowingly what it was. “I’m not telling you,” he replied, grinning. “It’s a part of the body.”
Later, he would give in and whisper close to Lee’s ear: “A wiener!”
“A lot of my stuff deals with sexuality and repression,” said Pudzis, looking cute and girlish even in lace-up boots and wide-leg pinstripe pants. She described the scenes of little forest creatures, rarely associated with carnivorous or carnal desire, as “buffered violence.”
Pudzis said she uses the animals and symbols in her work to evoke emotions rather than to directly represent particular social or sexual metaphors. But it’s tempting to put gender labels on the animals and to squeeze the symbols into analogies. Are the squirrels men, and are the rabbits women? Pouncing squirrels exhibit male aggression toward frightened feminine bunnies; in “2 squirrels and a bunny (sunny day),” squirrels hover over a rabbit’s sliced abdomen that resembles a vagina.
Red apples, which hang from trees and lie on the ground for the animals to pursue or possess, could represent relationship potential; pools of blood, on the other hand, could signify evidence of sexual or violent acts. In “with tree #1,” a squirrel suspended on a string stretches for an apple tree. Does he yearn for a companion? “with tree #2,” just below it, shows a bunny clutching her stomach next to a pool of blood, alone by an empty tree against a dark sky. Is this an abortion? The two frames tell a story when taken together, one which is open for interpretation.
Those paintings are merely the size of a children’s picture-book, while others are about the size of a coffee table. A series of larger paintigs feature Pudzis and Eric Quamme, her boyfriend of nine years, in various situations with wallpaper-like fruit patterns as the incongruously pleasant background: Quamme protecting her from a giant squirrel (another man?); Quamme without skin, like a model in an anatomy book; and Pudzis holding a spear through Quamme’s detached head, kabob-style, titled “sometimes i want to impale you.”
“When she puts this up, you definitely wonder what kind of relationship we have,” said Quamme, who works for a healthcare organization. He said the paintings, which Pudzis hung in their apartment before the exhibit, took some getting used to. “It’s art. I like it a lot.”
“I just feel like she’s got some violent aggression,” Quamme added, “and I feel like she gets it out through art.”
Pudzis’s self-portrait, “girl with bird and apple,” hangs at the front of the exhibit. She is pictured wearing a sweatshirt of the same pink hue as the tank-escaping rabbit. An apple balances on her head; only a marksman like William Tell could hit it without hurting her. If apples do symbolize relationships in Pudzis’ work (which may be a stretch), perhaps this means that only a special guy can win her without destroying her. A crow or raven perches on a tree branch at the level of her gray-blue eyes. On closer inspection, the fingers of Pudzis’s right hand, calmy placed in her lap, have been sliced off, and red paint smudges spot the canvas. It’s like she finger-painted with the stubs.
The real Pudzis still has her fingers. And her rabbit is just fine.
“I do have a bunny named Daisy,” Pudzis said. “I love him very much, and he still has his head.”