Idols and Oddities - Mailbox Art Space
I met Ivana Lilith at a pub on a night out, when a friend and I stopped in for a quick drink to break up the walk home. I don’t know how we got onto the subject, but I began explaining what I was doing with lowbrow (which I hadn’t actually started at that point) and she eagerly invited me to come see her upcoming exhibition.
Wunderkammer, literally translated from German means ‘wonder chamber’ or ‘room of wonders’. The term refers to cabinets of curiosities, collections of oddities and treasures, even royal collections of jewellery or similarly prized possessions. This is exactly what Ivana Lilith has transformed Mailbox Art Space into with her exhibition Idols and Oddities (I’m Your Wunderkammer Woman). The nineteen wooden mailboxes are reflective of old school museum display cases: little vitrines to house precious treasures safe behind their glass. On first impression Lilith’s ceramic sculptures, her ‘oddities’, are delicate and feminine, being protected in their display cases. White and pink, with horses, swans, lilies, and feminine curves are the first things you see. But when looking closer, this initial softness subsides - you see the hands ripping to open the chests of their headless figures. These are distorted, stretching, contorted humanoid creatures, some headless, others with devilish horns. There are cavernous yonic gaps, with layers of lips caressing and lapping at the edges of the void they envelop. Jutting out of some oddities are dicks with pointed heads like devil tails. These phallic objects are echoed in other oddities as if they are the single stamen that erupt from the centre of a lily. The creatures all transform into one another like a kind of flipbook or zoetrope. These feel like little flashes into another world, one I don’t quite understand but long to. Lilith’s pink fleshy objects are almost trapped in their glass cases, they seem to be begging to be set free to be able to finish changing. They sit on beds of small bones and broken shells - the prizes of their conquests, or perhaps the excess skin they’ve cast off in their transformations. Lilith writes in the text accompanying the exhibition “I shatter the cabinets I have been placed in and make my own … I reclaim my metamorphosis in all its interpretations.”
While I really love the oddities on display in the mailboxes, I’m even more drawn to the triptych of paintings hung on the walls up the stairs opposite the mailboxes. TAXIDERMY: IN DEATH I STILL LOVE YOU are three softly painted pastel swans, their chests torn open to expose the fleshy red cavities within. Lillies are clasped in the swan’s beaks and claws or blooming from within them. The swans echo the imagery, the mannerisms, and the colours we saw in the oddity sculptures below. The unstretched canvases are tacked to the walls, which reminds me of the way the posters, photographs, postcards, and letters I have taped to my bedroom walls look. The dried paint stuck is in a perpetual watery drip to the edge, almost like it’s the blood of the swans dripping from their ravaged bodies. They read as angels falling back to earth. Their cloudy eyes are unseeing, the talons curled and trailing behind. Their wings are not stretched in flight, nor are they tucked for rest. Heads encircled with radiant halos, they have been transformed into idols in their death.
While the show is small, and the space equally small, Ivana’s work is expansive. The story she tells reaches out from the mailboxes and fills to room. Idols and Oddities (I’m your Wunderkammer Woman) is on at Mailbox Art Space until the 14th of June.