An Artist In Her Garden
Andrea Flockhart, Beast Garden at Casino Artspace, Saturday February 25, 2017, Hamilton, Ontario
By Sylvia Nickerson
Andrea Flockhart, installation view of Beast Garden. Photo credit: Alejandro Collados-Núñez
Is there a beast inside of you? Are you on friendly terms with it or do you keep it locked in the dark? Andrea Flockhart’s Beast Garden invites you to consider your beast, to invite it to dine, to uncage it, woo it. Through this somewhat unnerving process you may discover your beast will try to kill you, or you it. Beast Garden morphs together the feminine, canine, and aqueous. The chimeric creatures on display – Flockhart’s titular beasts – suggest in turns genetic aberrations, the beings of classical myth, or the fearful monsters lurking within the superficial innocence of fairytales.
At the opening my daughter arrived in a t-shirt I had decorated as a teen: a sparkly unicorn head on white cotton. In Flockhart’s show, we stood beside a grotesque unicorn bust emerging in low relief from a purple sparkle background, its wrinkled flesh breaking out into a spotted rash as if revealing a hormonal imbalance. She had a mane of nails, an unsettling glass eye, bulbous teeth, a nose ring and barnacles attached to her face. This is the stuff of little girl attraction turned dark fantasy. On close encounter, another small painting revealed a woman in medieval dress being stabbed by a sword in one of her multiple eyes. Her bent frame both communicates submission to this violence and, simultaneously, an attempt to escape it.
Andrea Flockhart, installation view of Beast Garden. Photo credit: Alejandro Collados-Núñez
To craft an environment for her objects, Flockhart altered the walls and hung drapery to cloak the gallery in womb-like darkness. Cloths divided the space into intimate, private worlds. The space became a zoo of sorts, with darkened, quiet enclosures within which one might encounter a creature. The artist became zookeeper, tending her monsters, keeping them safe while protecting herself in a reciprocal and intimate relationship.
Flockhart makes her art with a multitude of mediums – paint, fabric, found objects, clay or plasticine – and also in a multitude of forms – flat, low relief, shadow box, or fully in the round. Her technical skills are particularly evident on the tiny scale. She renders the expressive details of her beasts most viscerally when working in miniature.
Flockhart’s beasts are notably female, with several being dog-like. In aggregate, their presence warns that femininity itself may be beastly, if not ghastly. Flockhart's beasts reveal that femininity is a twisted illusion, a fucked up landscape of projection, a hall of mirrors. It points to the accumulation of fractious qualities defining femininity in culture: a façade held up by a million plastic surgeries, toxic cosmetics, push-up bras, a million ways we’re wanted as good girls and rewarded for being objects. To be feminine in Flockhart’s world is to recognize the beast that governs you. Don’t be fooled by the girlish exterior. Inside that innocuous, passive innocence are grotesque forces at play. This aspect of Beast Garden resonated with me. Don’t let anybody tell you to put your beast away, or to be ashamed of it. The road to emancipation is one-way: free your beast.
Andrea Flockhart, installation view of Beast Garden. Photo credit: Alejandro Collados-Núñez
Suffering from something resembling a mid-life crisis, Sylvia Nickerson quit her job at York University to fancy herself a graphic novelist. The first three chapters of her comic memoir Creation are available at a few Hamilton bookstores. In her previous life she worked as a freelance illustrator and wrote academic articles about the history of nineteenth century mathematics and science.