Bonnie Marin

Remember that one last photograph from the shoot back in May of ’57 where Richard Avedon spent the whole day snapping Marilyn Monroe until the last photo captured a truly exhausted princess, not wanting to play Smiley no more? Her deflated look exposed what we never saw from this fashion, film and timeless art icon. From that moment on, that cultural flaw was more like an open wound, revealing what lay behind her slick curtain of glamour. Monroe was the peak of ideal feminine beauty that still rings true in the current mix of music video pulsations and movie star imitations. Looking back at any magazine from the ’50s, it’s hard not to be reminded of that blunt look on Monroe’s face when all the advertisements aimed to capture the plastic style of her Jekyll side only.

Peek into Bonnie Marin’s latest collages at Katharine Mulherin Gallery in Toronto, where the Winnipegbased, scissor-snapping, retro-advertising aficionado takes those flaws and smears raw tension around her Monroe-like vixens in “Women & Animals.” While Marin tells us this work is about women taming the beastly ravages of animals—whether it’s the frog perched at the bottom of a bed, the leopard by the poolside or the giraffe in the kitchen—it’s clearly about how women are the animals here. They’re foxy provocateurs commanding attention away from one another, like Jessica Rabbit stealing the spotlight or Betty and Veronica fighting over attention, or like how walking into this show is much like accidentally finding a two-dimensional Miss Universe change room (but minus all the catfights).

Representing the style of their time, these oil paint and magazine cut-outs on board and paper are not unlike retro film stills or vintage Americana stamps with whimsically painted backgrounds. But why aren’t they drawn? Why is only the easy stuff painted: the grass backgrounds, the flowing seas, the withering skies? Why has Marin left it up to mass production to cover the details for her? The art of collaging does that exactly, where picking and choosing what to keep in and cut out is the art of the ready-made. Kind of like the plastic surgery world where we have the choice to cut and paste our faces, breasts and asses, in dire hopes of becoming Hollywood through a fit-in cut-out game. But the ’50s pin-up girl was jolly and fun; if she’s not sitting atop a car hood, she’s cleaning the floors or enjoying a cocktail. Although the trophied look of the 34-24-36 body shape looks painful in these hot-rod cut-outs, natural beauty was at least remotely cherished. As the underwires point out—they’re real.

A soap opera drama in Nice water wings! comes to life: two women look scornfully at another one who admires herself in the vanity mirror like an outstretched swan entangled in her own elegance. But wait a second—haven’t we seen all this before? These two women are looking at something we’ve seen all along, watching the gaze with a reinvented, piqued cynicism.

The paper on paper collages are the strongest works in this show. It’s not Marin’s painting ability we’re looking at; we’re watching her explore the decision-making process and we should pay attention to that: why that woman, why that animal and who holds the power. No brushes get in the way; Marin stands back and the era speaks for itself.

The women are always doing one of two things in these collages: looking sexy or doing chores. When they’re doing chores, they’re loving it. They’re beautifully occupied with the practicality of life: folding the laundry, washing the dishes and making the bed. When they’re looking sexy, they’re dangerous. They hiss in positions of volatile expectation, like back issues of Playboy flirtations. Echoing the flauntings of Ottawa’s Eliza Griffiths or Toronto-based Allyson Mitchell’s wolf-like vixens, every day we are told more and more how Canadian women are shifting the gaze in such a way that they become the animals. As subjects they are always more predator than prey. Look at the gleeful gal in Octapussy, sharing her stall with an acrobatic octopus who hangs from the tap. These kinds of images are priceless—they’re quick, funny, and it’s effortless to connect with them because they’re simply effective. Frankly, it’s better than advertising. In one of the collages, a blonde cupcake flies across a bathroom on a swing, bigger than an elephant. An elephant. Then in another, there ’s the giant cockatiel perched on the driver’s window of the Cadillac out front. And when you wonder what kind of mess it’s going to leave on the hood, you find yourself smiling again. We can easily fall for these snappy one-liners as silly reflections or comically inclined, and they are refreshing. But they not only capture the era of their time, they remind us how far our culture has strayed from the quality of wholesome goodness, and of our second-hand imitations of such a thing. If there’s one animal Marin’s latest series would most resemble, it would be a chameleon. These women are always changing. From scene to scene, there’s the possibility each woman’s nature transforms in accordance to her moods.

Not unlike Avedon’s statement in revealing Monroe’s honesty, Marin experiments with the language of advertising by the way she takes it out of context. In The South Will Rise Again, a naked beefcake with a surprisingly limp package stands before two squealing Victorianesque girlies embarrassed by his modernist exposure in a public park. It is that spark of indecency that shows Marin is the creator of animalistic attraction, even in its retrograde states. Her strength is in knowing what hooks us—what a picture needs in order to be lit on fire. Pulling the strings and pulling the tension, she is making the connections, pasting Americana hot-rods into reconstructions of their era through selected magazine images. And magazines do create eras because magazines curate life. It’s just funny when they end up right where they started. ■

“The othergallery, Winnipeg, presents Bonnie Marin, Women & Animals” exhibited at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto from January 20 to February 11, 2006.

Nadja Sayej is a journalist who works in New York and Toronto.