Like a Rowdy Raccoon: Bianca Fields @ Dragon, Crab and Turtle, St Louis
May 05, 2021 | in Installation
When you put on a show entitled
Like a Rowdy Raccoon, comprising images and plush sculptures featuring Count von Count and Kermit the Frog from Sesame Street, Tom of Tom and Jerry, and a wide range of characters from the primates family, and hang it at Katherine Bernhardt's newly launched Dragon, Crab, and Turtle Gallery, you got our 100% attention! And this is precisely the case with Bianca Fields' major solo exhibition which is on view at Saint Louis' newest art venue.
The choice of protagonists in Fields' work contributes to the tension that holds the highly expressive imagery together. On one hand, evoking nostalgia and connection through frequent tributes to familiar cartoon characters, she quickly turns the tables with the introduction of wildlife archetypes, namely enraged mandrills. With "somebody to lean on" in a questionable face-off with an instinctively terrifying ape, she makes the viewer instantly question their role and responsibilities in the world as humans. "I think when the dominating subject is selected, it becomes perhaps a surrogate for myself, and that’s how I arrive at how the tension is depicted throughout the painting. Over time, throughout the constant motion of revisiting subjects in my work, I begin to constantly question a real-life primate and a product of American pop culture, and how they can be analogous in the way in which they have always existed in the same psychological space," the artist told us how this interaction informs the general atmosphere and role attribution. In the end, these familiar faces evoke a discussion about the themes of humor, identity, as well as painterly tradition, all of which are purposely pushed out of their appointed balance in these edgy visuals.