by Renny Pritikin
A one-person show usually consists of extended meditations on a single theme, but there are other, rarer exhibitions that are much more difficult to decipher, including Gay Outlaw’s Inner Sousaphone. A modestly scaled show of only 13 pieces, Outlaw’s sculptures and prints read as the residue of a restive mind engaged with thorny aesthetic puzzles. “The message,” she states on her Wikipedia page, “is no message. I call it formal free association.”
While taking a break from writing this review, I picked up The New York Times and read a quote from sculptor Rebecca Horn saying any exhibition of her work is “a group show of myself.” Another point of comparison is Bay Area sculptor Vince Fecteau, with whom Outlaw shares a fascination with the mechanics of how things look. She is meticulous in contemplating and then enacting minute alterations of an object to achieve subtle but tangible shifts in how we see it. I also think of the post-minimalist sculptor Richard Tuttle in this same way, how he chooses to place small, mundane objects with infinite care, considering their perception from the viewer’s perspective amid the architecture of a room.
Outlaw was born in Alabama in 1959. She studied French at the University of Virginia, followed by a year’s study of pastry making in Paris, and another year in New York studying at the International Center for Photography. Her first shows in San Francisco starting around 1990 often involved amiable installations of layer cake into gaps in gallery walls. In 1995 she established her career with the public art piece TW/DM, a long serpentine aluminum wall containing 700 fruitcakes, a project I curated.
Here, five apparently identical linocuts sourced from a snapshot of a dog’s front legs demonstrate her conceptual approach. Outlaw hand-printed them using eight plates showing inevitable variations in saturation of the ink and alignment, something a quick appraisal wouldn’t reveal. If the piece carried a title it might read, “here’s something I worked on laboriously, trying to be perfect, and I’m revealing everything that I came up with, failures and all.”
Theadora Walsh, the exhibition’s curator, chose mostly current works; one outlier, Three Legged Inversion (aluminum), dates to 2009. This and Untitled (Glass Mitre) appear to be tongue-in-cheek homages to 20th-century masters Donald Judd and Robert Smithson, respectively. In the first, Outlaw tips over three legs that might form three of the eight edges of a Judd table, drills her trademark holes in it, applies fake inkjet holes, and positions the pointy vertice of the triangle-shaped object upward. I can’t help seeing it as a dog burying a bone with its butt in the air. She gives Smithson’s Mirror/Salt works a cartoon treatment, replacing the mirrors with a hinged, colored glass object embedded in what looks to be black dirt but is actually painted wood. The faces of the glass are divided into mustard yellow and black trompe l’oeil grids that are luscious and Disneyesque.
Untitled (Mamma A Column), a rounded eleven-foot-tall column made of wood slats, dramatically commands the space. Streaks of black paint scraped around the center suggest text. Its minimal surface invites speculation: Is it a papyrus scroll, a napkin in a ring, a subway pillar with advertising posted around the middle? The title suggests humorous subterfuge of a blatantly phallic form.
Two enigmatic, untitled small works, a painting and a woodcut (subtitled Inner Sousaphone), resist interpretation. The painting looks down at a work table, while four circular containers compete for the eye: a sink, a plate, a garbage can on the floor, and a watermelon-shaped ceramic bowl, liquid blackness slopping over its sides from a gaping abyss of a mouth. So many clues in so small a space. Similarly inscrutable, the woodcut might be a person spelunking on her hands and knees, shining a bright yellow light into a cave. Inside that beam of light a pinkish, horn-shaped shadow can be seen. Is it a sousaphone, a kind of tuba? If, so “inner tuba” would be a bad pun related to keeping afloat in a bewildering world of options and possibilities. Whatever the case, Outlaw remains one of the Bay Area’s most consistently original and rigorous artists.
# # #
Gay Outlaw: “Inner Sousaphone” @ Et al. through June 1, 2024.
About the author: Renny Pritikin was the chief curator at The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from 2014 to 2018. Before that, he was the director of the Richard Nelson Gallery at UC Davis and the founding chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts beginning in 1992. For 11 years, he was also a senior adjunct professor at California College of the Arts, where he taught in the graduate program in Curatorial Practice. Pritikin has given lecture tours in museums in Japan as a guest of the State Department, in New Zealand as a Fulbright Scholar, and visited Israel as a Koret Israel Prize winner. The Prelinger Library published his most recent book of poems, Westerns and Dramas, in 2020. He is the United States correspondent for Umbigo magazine in Lisbon, Portugal and the author of a recently published memoir, At Third and Mission: A Life Among Artists.
