Jo Hormuth at Tough - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions

Jo Hormuth's installation Inflorescence, a colorful garden of 10 botanic forms, was a playful probing into the complex issues of gender and sexuality. Hormuth used the floral image for all its familiar metaphorical associations with the female body, in particular the reproductive organs. However, by her choice of materials and working process she added a wry and erotic twist to her theme. Close inspection of these bright blossoms revealed them to be constructed from life-sized wool felt skirts upended and coated in resin, while their stamens were fashioned from plastic rods bearing Day-Glo feet cast from the inside of high-heeled shoes.

This interest in unconventional materials is typical of Hormuth's installations, as is her thoughtful and often humorous transformation of ordinary objects. Her previous works, such as Endgame (1992), a series of plaster impressions of buttocks cast from a wide range of human characters, reveal similar explorations in sexuality and gender identification. Other installations have addressed the role of the viewer and issues of voyeurism, as suggested here by the upturned skirts that overtly seduce and titillate.

Hormuth's fetishistic forms take their inspiration from both high and low culture. At the "low" end of the scale, her sources range from the kitsoh/ camp sensibility of Pop Art to Marilyn Monroe's famous upswept skirt in The Seven Year Itch. As for her high-art influences, her vaginal images recall the eroticized flowers of Georgia O'Keeffe, the sexualized peppers of Edward Weston and Robert Mapplethorpe's orchids that embody characteristics both phallic and female. Likewise there is a kinship to Surrealism's cult of the everyday object and its transference of the private and ordinary into the realm of public fantasy and display.

Hormuth successfully blurs the distinctions between readymade, sculpture and craft by choosing materials that despite their tactility exude a commanding physical presence. The artist's interventions center on process, particularly the domestic/feminine activity of sewing, and on the organic malleable properties inherent in her materials. Although her vessel-like forms celebrate the traditions of ceramics and fiber, she imbues them with the reductive, serial, even industrial codes of Minimalism.

The artist raised a number of important and diverse issues in this show, particularly concerning women and the body, but did not explore these subjects in the kind of depth that she has in previous installations. Hormuth's brand of conceptualism, though pointed, is friendly, engaging the viewer without being heavy-handed. In the end Inflorescence provided a humorous and poetic visual experience, and it marked an important pass in this young artist's career.

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