exhibit: Dia De Los Muertos
The skull as symbol for mortality has been done to death. To wit: Hamlet contemplating a skull in Act 5, Scene 1 (“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”); memento mori paintings of the 16th and 17th centuries; almost every depiction of Saint Jerome; Mesoamerican crystal skulls; and, more recently, Damien Hirst’s For The Love of God and For Heaven’s Sake, a pair of diamond-encrusted “anthropomorphised disco balls.” Head to Secret Fresh Gallery and you’ll find even more craniums on display for the sake of art.
Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a group exhibition that embraces the obvious connection between skulls and the Mexican holiday similar to All Souls’ Day. “It’s a cliché, I know,” admits curator Lena Cobangbang in the vernacular. And yet, she continued, participants were still able produce great work despite the overdone premise. “It just goes to show that clichés can still be the basis for art.”
The idea of Dia De Los Muertos is simple. Three weeks before the exhibition opening, Cobangbang chose artists of different persuasions—from street to social realist, lowbrow to conceptual—and gave them each a resin skull. There were no rules; the artists were free to do whatever they wanted as long as they could meet the deadline.
“I really like the energy,” says Cobangbang, as she walks among shelves filled with punk skulls sporting mohawks—a popular hairstyle among the dead as it turns out—made from paintbrushes, plastic tag fasteners, and pink wooden slats.
There are skulls with horns and skulls with sunglasses; skulls that glow in the dark and skulls that literally stink. There are skulls covered in vintage stamps and pig skin; skulls impersonating Amelia Earhart (the flight goggles give her away), the Virgin Mary, a samurai warrior, and the Calumet Baking Powder Company Indian. There are skulls caught in mid-eyeroll and skulls with eyes cartoonishly popping out.
(on view until Nov. 18 at Secret Fresh Gallery; shown above: War Chief by Epjey Pacheco)
