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No one in
Los Angeles has as sweet a tooth for the exquisite miniature as
Darryl Couturier. Earlier this year, he offered up a dazzling
roomful of bite-size works by Maritta Tapanainen—diminutive, but
one of the most exhilarating shows I’ve seen in ages. Now,
Couturier is presenting Elsa Mora’s exhibition
“Especimenes/Specimens,” a blithe, sinewy meditation on the
intersection of family history and capital-h History, which
features a great number of works that could be held comfortably in
the palm of a (very small) human hand. Like many Cuban-American
artists, Mora is a student of genealogy and exile, and she is not
entirely above the slightly overfamiliar image—such as those
involving lepidopterological conceits that too facilely recall
Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez. (I could live without
Barbra Streisand’s and Liz Taylor’s heads appended to butterfly
bodies.) But there are far suppler notions than faux magic realism
here. How often “memory” and “the body” are bandied about
together—but how rarely they come into sync as they do here, in a
series of sparrow-size images of female bodies stuffed with
feathers, with fishes, with leaf stems that seem to have been gnawed
by butterflies. (Mora’s pictures of metamorphosis are all the more
enchanting for being so small.) Elsewhere, we are encouraged to turn
the crank on a music box festooned with a tiny statue of an armless
body covered in roses, seemingly buried upside down—a more lyrical
version of the opening image of Alfred Jarry’s Caesar
Antichrist? Elsewhere again, the bodies of young moms are coolly
poised against a bellows-like food-squeezing device. Nearly every
one of Mora’s works detonates with a sly, understated assurance;
the cumulative effect is staggering.
—Matthew
Wilder
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