BAD SEED

Myfanwy MacLeod’s work is always double-edged. Beneath its cute surface is a subversive undertow. If it had a personality, you could say it was passive-aggressive, as if it were the revenge fantasy of a service worker. MacLeod’s exhibition A Brief Overview of Personology (2000) posed the artist herself within this subservient role; but the work also presents a somewhat abject, and apologetic presence —seeming to combine the self-abrogation of slapstick, such of that of Buster Keaton, with the self-defeating, short-fused reactions of hapless, cartoon characters, like Sylvester or Wiley E. Coyote. In the end, though, she pulls the rug under our feet. The comic element in her work takes the edge off even while putting its potential referents on it.

Double readings are inherent to her work. These readings may correspond to the two sides of the sculpture, which often have a front and a back, like My Idea of Fun (1997). The front of this giant inflatable is a loopy, drunken happy face; the unguarded rear is a rude anal sex toy large enough for the insertion of one’s whole body. Meaning flashes between the two, much as in the slapstick conceptualism of Bruce Nauman’s 1972 Run from Fear, Fun from Rear, which switches in neon from one phrase to another, on and off, radically altering interpretation.

MacLeod’s sculptures inhabit the gallery as if they were unruly refugees from their source-worlds of cartoons and films. When they enter stage right or left though, they are captured and fixed, as if startled out of context in our gaze. Embodied in three dimensions, they still function as signs but, now ungrounded from their original situations, their references are multi-valent with meaning dependent on their new art contexts.

Another context of realization for MacLeod’s figurative sculpture is the architectural folly. Take the work at The Power Plant. Three separate elements—combine to create a bawdy and tempestuous hillbilly theme park. Hillbillies are the stereotypical slacker culture—abject losers in incestuous backwoods enclaves who, at the same time, manifest elaborate craft sills in their music and illicit moonshine. MacLeod’s ornately rustic outhouse of The Tiny Kingdom (2001) comically answers the fierce outlaw independence expressed in the homily “a man’s home is his castle”. This architectural claptrap, however, is derived from Disney’s 1968 movie Chitty, Chitty Bang, Bang. Its kitsch pseudo-Edwardian foppish elegance serves the mock imperialism of the title, while its rude placement in a gallery uncrowns another authority.