Jan. 20, 2010 - Issue #744: The Great Indoors

ROAD STORIES: Roadkill comedy

Road Stories is playfully macabre and skillfully done

Rachel Hellner's Road Stories at Harcourt House is a simple but effective collection of drawings, paintings and mixed-media work featuring roadkill which skillfully balances its macabre subject matter with playful humour. Her works are well-executed and visually interesting and, although they ultimately don't have much to say beyond their premise and a touch of an obvious "roadkill is bad and arbitrary" narrative, Hellner experiments with their construction in an appealing way.

The images of Road Stories are all dominated by the awkward shapes of animals struck down crossing the road. Mixed in with various grounds and some other bits of highway debris—rags and gloves and such that have also be run over repeatedly—the animals are represented in a variety of forms: lively drawings and paintings and digital prints, as well as more experimental forms including bodies made from dog fur and impasto acrylic forms that look like potato prints or stencils of some kind. These rigid animals remind us that they are really dead, because Hellner's rough-but-certain line makes the drawn animals seem to be ready to move, and she embraces the absurdity of their poses. She writes that some of them seem to be still alive, whether sleeping or still moving around. To me, some of the frozen, reaching poses call to mind the jerky animation of 1999's classic Internet craze, The Hamster Dance (you can find the original, for comparison, at webhamster.com—watch the one with its arms up in the air, turning around and around). The sense of motion is a dark joke, but it's a good one.

The humour here is very much intentional. On the far wall of the gallery, colourful animals and rags from the road are lined up in a pattern, and alongside the prints is a wonderful slot machine containing the same images. It's silly in a good way and speaks to Hellner's interest in the arbitrariness of these animals' ends. It's clear that she's saying something about how terrible it is that these animals were killed on the road—especially considering how many animals there are just in this one room—without saying much more about it, but she doesn't belabour this fairly obvious point and it comes across well in the subtext of this very funny little interactive sculpture.

On the left-hand wall as you come in, larger drawings on Mylar are the real showcase of Hellner's technique, and although the images themselves are less obviously experimental as the dog-fur pieces or the slot machine, the transparent works, some of them pieced together as the painting overflowed the sheet, hang like trophies or aging slaughtered livestock from a bar. Again, Hellner is approaching a statement about the deaths of the animals which seems a little shallow, but again I am not upset about it in light of the work itself and the playful execution and display. I would love to see Hellner tackling something bigger, or taking these works conceptually further (as long as she is careful not to cross into the trite), critically exploring her interest in this worldwide roadkill-documentation project, but in the meantime this collection is entertaining and worth a look. V

Until Sat, Feb 13
Road Stories
Works by Rachel Hellner
Harcourt House (Third Floor, 10215 - 112 St)

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