"Is dressing a Christmas tree a folk art practice? If it is, it's certainly one of Eurocentric culture's most popular and enduring. What other tedious, decorative ritual do hundreds of millions of households take up annually, whether stringing their trees with lights and family ephemera, or tinseling and setting them with fancy porcelain tableaux? The trees have largely morphed from religious emblem to autobiographical totem in our highly secular age."
"At PDX Contemporary Art, Jeffry Mitchell's show Winter Blooming runs about the lifespan of a Tannenbaum, through December 27, though its Christmas Tree on a Birdhouse has a longer shelf life. Mitchell makes what he calls gay folk art. The pots and pictures and tables and stools and mailboxes and fireplaces represent a version of gay normalcy. Mitchell mentions decoration in the artist statement-the insult par excellence in fine art circles-though decorating isn't exactly what he's done to the gallery, or not all he's done."
"With respect and admiration, Mitchell draws on folk art traditions the same way the author of a realist novel or memoir draws on the familiar world; folk art, broadly, is his medium, the context in which he can render and celebrate his singular experience, perhaps critiquing broader norms along the way. Particularly, his work transforms an idea of the home-the things that surround and support a life-into his home, his inner life."
Jeffry Mitchell stages domestic objects as folk-art installations that translate household decoration into autobiographical queer totems. A central work features a spare fir on a cartoonish birdhouse, adorned with porcelain miniatures including owls, bears, a rooster, monks, farmers, and recurring elefants. The exhibition positions pots, tables, stools, mailboxes, and fireplaces as elements of a constructed home and a version of gay normalcy. Mitchell borrows folk traditions to celebrate singular experience and to gently critique broader social norms. Ornament and decoration function as mediums for intimacy, memory, and identity rather than mere embellishment.
Read at Portland Monthly
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]