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| Judy Onofrio, Flux |
Judy Onofrio and her daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes have an exhibition whose spooky undertones are sometimes successful, and sometimes not. Here's my review in The Kansas City Star.
If you think “Danse Macabre” is just a delightfully overplayed Camille Saint-Saens tone poem, you should hasten to see this odd mother-daughter exhibition at Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Haunting bone sculptures and ghostly photographs create a new dance macabre.
Artists who use bones in their work surely realize the slender edge of disturbing upon which they dance.
Wisconsin self-taught artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein suggested visionary worlds with his delicate chicken and turkey bone thrones and towers.
Bones eerily suggest death since they are only available once a being is finished with them, or more precisely, dead.
And yet, Judy Onofrio turned to them after confronting a serious illness, as if to deny bones their death relation and confirm them as life affirming and spiritual, even.
Perhaps more interestingly, Onofrio untethers herself from the female figure, visual cacophony, and the carnival colors that dominated her work for so long.
In the “Earth Bound” sculptures, Onofrio gathers bones in decorative clusters, which she paints in delicate pale greens and creams.
Most of the sculptures deploy cattle and other large mammal bones. These bones feel uncomfortably human in scale, and generally fall into two categories, freeform and attached to wall-mounted bases. The freeform works feel active, engaging, as if they might jettison from the wall, and Onofrio presents them in surprisingly varied ways.
“Twist” is one of the largest free-form sculptures into which Onofrio incorporates curvaceous horns with the bones. Smooth and ribbed, the horns weave through the bones, gracefully tying the work together.
There are a few sculptures with tiny bones. In “Dig 1,” “2,” and “3,” Onofrio crams diminutive mouse bones into a decorative trough-like mount. These fragments, all jumbled together and painted a creamy hue, feel old, as if they have been unearthed from an antique cabinet of curiosities.
The 2009 works, which are displayed on oval wall-mounted bases, are more closely related to her former works — they incorporate mirrors, pearls, fruit, teeth, branches, glass orbs and other non-bone detritus. And yet by painting them with monochromatic pale colors, Onofrio encourages serenity rather than chaos.
Onofrio’s daughter Jennifer Onofrio Fornes cuts close to the spooky bone with her ghostly photographs. While she uses her own body in the images, they are not self-portraits; in fact the body is scarcely discernible. Instead, the grainy, velvety, wispy images suggest otherworldly beings.
Borrowing from 19th century spiritualism and ghost photography, Fornes capitalizes on the romantic notion of communicating with beings from the spirit world. Her large silver gelatin prints are beautiful, lush, full of dramatic movement and have evocative titles such as “Deep Sleep,” “The Space Between,” and “Falling Away,” which emphasize her narrative.
Fornes uses her body, ethereal textiles, and the studio to create images that suggest an absence and a presence. As she moves through the studio, her camera captures ghostlike movement, suggesting something or someone.
The small, white-framed oval images of her “Trace” series are even more ephemeral. Blown out to almost indiscernible imagery, the photographs have only the slightest grey-to-white contrast. An image is just barely apparent.
Fornes’ work suggests the disembodied spirit of things or beings that are present, but not quite there, while her mother’s work unearths the presence of beings that have been, and what remains behind.
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