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Monsters in the shower drain
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I live in an old, 1920's apartment building, which has old, 1920's porcelain bathroom fixtures. This includes my tub, and a peculiar drain that takes only two or three stray hairs to back up entirely. The postscript to every shower (and sometimes the intermission) is cleaning out the drain so that I won't end up with soapy-slick bathtub rings.
I'll be honest: this small daily task creeps me out. Hair is such a central part of what makes each person visually human, and it is a comforting, familiar part of each of our identities. When hair is detached from the scalp, it can be eerily like an amputated limb; unchanged from its original state, it is both alive and dead at the same time. The clumps of hair that I discard at the end of each shower feel primordial: warm and wet and organic, they are the tailings of a swampy creature living in my drain.
Gala Bent brings my worst fears to life, at least on paper. I saw her small show at the Gallery4Culture a couple months ago; her drawings of strange, otherworldly figures of hair and flesh (but few recognizable features) got me thinking about human hair and severed limbs. Not that Bent's work is gory -- it isn't. Her works on paper are delicate line drawings, colored with gouache; they are pretty and orderly and remind me of soothing children's fairytale illustrations. And like some children's fairytale illustrations, they are also dark, slightly menacing, and permeated with gestures towards alchemy, sorcery, and black magic.
Gala Bent's monsters are perversions of natural structures. Like the eerie dermoid cysts that grow out of embryonic cells but result only in masses of hair and teeth and glands, Bent's figures are made of recognizable features into unrecognizable creatures. They are, in a word, monsters. Historically, monsters in art and literature signaled a profound disruption in the spiritual world. So, in a 13th century English text where a Christian princess is forced to marry a sultan when her father is defeated in a holy war, she bears the sultan a shapeless lump of mottled flesh. (Naturally, the child was redeemed - and made whole - through baptism.) Monsters were prodigies: they were single, impotent creatures whose sole purpose was to be a harbinger of the divine. Saints were - spiritually, anyway - identical: they bore no offspring and survived only long enough for their death to serve as a medium for God's message. Once the prodigy has fulfilled its spiritual purpose, it ceased to exist. In the modern world, monsters present a slightly different kind of perversion: they appear when men - in the name of science - muddle in the affairs of God. The fear of embryonic stem cell research is that we'll create freak babies who have four legs, two arms, and no head.
I can't look away. In the image above, Party Pooper (2007-2009), Bent taps into this iconography of our nightmares, where death and life, organic and inorganic are all intermingled. The silent, deadly shark - a sign of death and predation lurking invisibly below the water's surface - is pursued by a frightening but ridiculous creature that could have emerged from my shower drain. Like a bogeyman, the hair creature only exists to frighten, though it has no teeth, no real bodily power to harm. The image is full of the same spiritual tension evoked by medieval monsters. All of Bent's works are like this: they jumble together animal, vegetable, and mineral to produce images that are unsettling and eerie. Clearly these prodigious creatures have not lost their ability to make us take pause. Everything old is always new again.
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