COLORADO EXPRESSIONS -- Summer, 1996 (magazine)

ART SCENE by M. S. Mason (Feature Article)

THREE ARTISTS HAVE JUST ONE THING IN COMMON -- THEY ALL MAKE EXCEPTIONAL, SURPRISING IMAGES OF ANIMALS.

Animals have appeared in art from ancient times, and, in fact, many cultures have a high art tradition surrounding animal imagery, especially as those animals are objects of worship--consider the cats of ancient Egypt.

But this is late 20th Century America, and animal imagery means something different now. Three artists whose love for and fascination with animals have produced radically different iconographies have only one thing in common--they all make exceptional, surprising images of animals. Jill Hadley Hooper, DeDe LaRue and Philip Sims have something more in mind than simple reproduction or even idealization.

DEDE LARUE

A life-sized puma walks through a large dog-door right into your space. A pale blue half-sized horse, a map of the world painted all over it, grazes in cosmic nonchalance on the floor of the gallery. A beautiful fox gazes right at you, his coat reflecting a forest fire. And a mounted deer head with soulful eyes and real antlers is covered all over, not in fur but in green plastic leaves.
These are the strangely immediate sculptures of DeDe LaRue. There is something naive and folk-art-like about them, yet they all nod at sophisticated formal concerns, make serious political statements and incorporate humor with an almost pessimistic savvy about the state of the environment. LaRue means to raise a little consciousness about important issues--but she chooses to amuse, to show how things are rather than rant or preach. Her papier-mache beauties are also aesthetically pleasing and emotionally satisfying because she acknowledges sentiment without exploiting it in sentimentality.
She has loved and worked with animals all her life, breeding, showing and grooming dogs, and studying every other of the four-leggeds she could find--she is a voracious and eclectic reader. A self-taught artist who worked on graffiti projects (painting trash cans around the city) she learned to use spray-can enamel with great accuracy. She still uses it to air-brush her papier-mache sculpture because she found that the pigment never fades or changes. In recent years, she has also learned to work with new materials taken from taxidermy catalogues, covering armature for stuffed heads with her own special formula for papier-mache, and even using taxidermy glass eyes to give her rock-hard animals a new dimension of realism.
She has done several "stuffed heads" series. In the "Green Animal Series," LaRue's animals (bears and deer, mostly) covered in green plastic leaves, are mysterious, vernal and only slightly disturbing. The taxidermy eyes and the perfect forms remind us of the live animals who have been shot and stuffed as trophies. The plastic leaves invoke images of the forest and at the same time remind us that plastic decorations ordinarily pollute the environment, but may be recycled into something beautiful. She has done as much for plastic flowers and fruit in sometimes ingenious combinations--a snarling bear covered in bright fruit hilariously speaks to human imposition on nature and the relativity of ferocity.
LaRue's love for dogs is evident everywhere one looks in the Art of Craft gallery. For LaRue as for Hooper, dogs are symbols of benevolence. "I like to comment on the relations between humans and animals," she says. "We have created dogs through genetic engineering--an enormous variety of dogs--from a wolf gene pool." And because humans have engineered such a large variety of dogs, dogs are once removed from nature--reflecting human concerns as no other animal does.
"Animals are weirdly fascinating," says LaRue. "They are arty, magical and unique." And those are exactly the qualities in her sculpture. One outstanding piece is particularly mysterious and almost mystical. It is from the stuffed head series--a deer's head with real antlers and large soft taxidermy eyes. It is pained as a night skyscape--a sunset (at the base of the neck) just fading into a darkest velvet blue (on the face and head). It speaks of immortality--the deer as permanent idea.