Bizarre Fantasies of Half-Human Birds and Magnificent Flowers Come Alive in Intricate Collages
Courtesy of Turner Carroll Gallery.
Jenny Honnert Abell’s highly detailed collages are brimming with strange, unearthly imagery that marries the everyday with pure fantasy. The artist has a particular predilection for anthropomorphic birds, which appeared throughout “Pretty, Peculiar,” an exhibition of two recent bodies of work—a set of collages on painted panels and several examples from her ongoing “Book Cover” series—recently on view at Santa Fe’s Turner Carroll Gallery.
Influenced by the precision of architecture (her father was an architect) and the free-flowing whimsy of fairytale illustrations, Abell began making collages after years of collecting all kinds of odds and ends. She builds her imagery—half-human fowl, flowers, tree trunks, warped appendages—from of all sorts of unexpected, everyday materials, from tiny beads, false eyelashes, and lint to snipped pieces of leather gloves. She has a knack for creating different textures, and also uses embroidery and quilting to alter her surfaces. Each work offers a dreamy narrative that is made all the more intriguing by small, ominous details—a “coexistence of beauty and adversity,” as Abell calls it.
For her collages on panels, Abell begins with layers of oil paint to create a rich surface that she can retool and overlay with her delicate handiwork. In Nothing Else Matters (2015), an inky night sky is speckled with glittery stars nestled into small pools of dark blue paint. The human head of the intricately plumed bird looks like a Neo-Classical illustration. The odd, rather elegant creature clutches a bloody mass of fur. The trunk, meanwhile, is composed of dozens of pieces of material that have been crinkled accordion-style to create a densely textured bark-like surface. Two small shoots covered with beads blossom from one branch. In For Myself (2015), a bird with a mysteriously bandaged human head and diseased face is the solemn subject. It sits on a branch encrusted with beads, rhinestones, and sequins, bringing a sumptuous sparkle to the dark composition.
Abell’s book-cover series, meanwhile, originated when she decided to challenge herself to make a collage per day—a radical shift from from the time-consuming labor-intensive process of making her panels. Instead, she creates hand-crafted backgrounds from vintage books, allowing the original patterns (and wear and tear) of the covers to remain intact as she re-imagines them with her own storybook scenes. The familiar humanoid birds appear, sometimes with spiritual touches. The bird in Book Cover No. 177 (2015), for instance, bears the head of Jesus, complete with tiny halo. The creature rests on a branch made from collaged fragments of biblical text. In contrast, Book Cover No. 179 (2015) is purely fueled by the artist’s imagination, and comes together like a scene from a quirky children’s book. Here, three reaching hands grow from a striped, stout pair of legs, topped with a grassy ring against the pebbly leather of the book cover. These bizarre combinations of everyday materials and images evoke the dreamy weirdness of Surrealism. Though small in size, Abell’s highly imaginative compositions hold vast worlds all their own.
—Kate Haveles
“Jenny Honnert Abell: Pretty, Peculiar” was on view at Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe, Oct. 16–Nov. 3, 2015.
