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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
Hogin usually does her paintings as diptychs, triptychs or series. One of the funniest and most disturbing is her "Bunny Suites," three series of small portraits of rabbits that have apparently mutated, turning pink or acquiring the fur of some other beast, such as a tiger, the menacing teeth of a predator and, in some cases, the pose of a centerfold model. In fact, she says, they are loosely based on the "odalisques" made famous in the paintings of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, whose early 18th century pictures mythologized the sensuality and eroticism of Turkish harem slaves.
In his pursuit of the erotic, Ingres depicted female bodies that would be deformed in real life. "Those women are literally disabled. They couldn't walk if they tried to get up," Hogin says. As many have pointed out, Ingres' harem slaves would have had to have extra vertebrae to appear in real life as they do in his paintings. "Distortion in service of sexualizing the body becomes an interesting icon of sexist desires and sexist assumptions," Hogin says.
It's important to her that the paintings not be seen as geared to an elite audience. Hogin says that "the fact that the art world is so opaque has always bothered me a little bit," which is why she strives to make her work accessible. Indeed, one needn't have any deep knowledge of art to appreciate her paintings. They're extraordinary objects in their own right (she also builds most of her own elaborate frames), and the subtext of meaning is easily discerned.
"It seems to me there is a lot of work out there that just reiterates and emphasizes the class structure in this country by being intentionally opaque and inaccessible," Hogin says. "While my paintings are supported by people with money, I also find that when they get reproduced in [print] magazines or online that I get a response from a wide variety of people who really do understand them and read into the images.
"Surprisingly," she adds, " a lot of art-educated people are the ones that don't get it, and a lot of bright, interested people who don't happen to be art-educated do get it. One of the most gratifying things to me is when I hear from those people."
Despite the precision and degree of detail evident in her work, Hogin is a fast painter. Even one of her most ambitious pieces, the 8-by-10-foot "Allegory of the Free Market," done in 1999, took just three weeks to complete. It's one of her more spectacular pictures in which tiger-striped and leopard-spotted deer, some sporting excessive antlers, seem to be rearing up and bucking in hysteria while strange mutant rabbits and monkeys sit below them and a Bambiesque fawn shrieks from its perch on a hill. A banner is tied to one deer's antler. It reads "Laissez Faire."
The look of the piece, Hogin says, is loosely based on the over-the-top, heroic style of Napoleonic war painting, a formulaic approach that usually included the same essential ingredients. "There was always a hill and a yellow and black sky with roiling clouds or the smoke from battle fires," she says. "My painting cannibalizes some of that formula to talk about the romanticizing and idealization of free market theology, which was very prevalent in the '90s; people all the time talking about markets and how the invisible hand solves problems.
"These creatures in the painting, these deer, have become rampant because of free market policies," she explains. "Unregulated use of land has resulted in the destruction of predator habitat. One species becomes unbalanced, in a sense, and overruns everything." Deer overpopulation is a phenomenon that's quite real in many regions of the U.S., and in Hogin's hands works as a biting metaphor for the glorification of the free market ideology so prevalent in the 1990s.
Hogin's next exhibition opens Nov. 1 at the Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles. Her current preoccupation and the subject of the work in that show is, appropriately enough, "orientalism, the history of how we've looked east, and how we and the East have looked at each other over this significant cultural divide." Hogin explains: "We've always looked at the orient as mysterious and exotic, and as a series of commodities, but we've never understood them and they've never understood us. In the history of painting, the Middle East and the way French painters [such as Ingres] looked at the Islamic world is very interesting to me."
Hogin's a prolific, ambitious painter and a vital thinker. Her prescience in doing work that takes up greed and its catastrophic results resonates acutely now that many of the corporate elite have been exposed as narcissistic plunderers of the public trust. Her new work, which looks at the West's view of the East, the relevance of which can be seen in the news every day, promises to be just as provocative. If, as has often been said, the function of an artist in society is much the same as a canary in a coal mine, Hogin's art is worth watching closely.
