REVIEW: Jessie Weitzel's Ny By
Backtalk is among my favorite Portland stores; I'll just say that now. They have an ever-rotating mix of mod tops, dresses, pants, and jewelry hand-selected from local thrift stores or stitched with love by local artisans and designers. I'm a proud owner a Laurs Kemp original shirt; she's a clothier quickly blowing up the Portland fashion scene with her sleek feminist screen prints and body positive sizes. Catch her in the latest issue of Portland Monthly in a fashion spread about the city's garment district!
Thanks for the brief digression, because I really am in love with Kemp's designs. More to the point, however, is my love of Kemp's—and Backtalk's—seamless storefront integration of fashion and art objects. Kemp boasts an exclusive accessories partnership with metalsmith Lane Walkup, who forges and casts the most beautiful clothing hangers (and kitchen knives) you could ever hope to see. Whimsically shaped after fashionably gapped teeth and woven fruit-baskets, Walkup's functional sculptures staunchly support and sustain Kemp's minimal garments: these hangers are a marvel all their own! Lucky for me, and any visitor to Backtalk, Walkup's hangers and other wire sculptures are permanent and watchful fixtures at the boutique. They hang unassumingly from the walls and ceilings, bare of tops and dresses yet fully capable of carrying visual interest even apart from the clothes they were forged to hang. The wire creations can be viewed from any angle, constantly evolving and changing shape like the mobile's of Alexander Calder.
Walkup's work is currently on display alongside pastel prodigy Jessie Weitzel. Wetizel's show, entitled Ny By and pronounced "knee bee," is a confection, comprised of fatty yet decadent desserts and custom tables plated somewhat post-apocalyptically between racks of rainbow clothing and atop fanciful jewelry displays. The works are playful and fondly childish: pink marbled tones are molded into chunky hairbrushes, candy-colored burgers, and daisy chainlink necklaces. Celebrating the best of girlhood, Weitzel unmistakably reminds us twenty-somethings of Lisa Frank-fueled birthday parties full of prank calls, Nickelodeon, and hair-braiding circles. But something more mysterious lurks beneath the fimo clay surface, reminiscent of Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Will Cotton's edgy candy-scapes, or David Altmejd's rough crystalline portraiture.
The moderately exaggerated size of Weitzel's forms, and their overtly vintage and consumerist associations, suggests divine consequence. I even felt the pull and unpacking of the seven deadly sins, namely gluttony—after all, the title of the show, Ny By, as explained in Weitzel's artist statement, is the name of a fictional town in a (not-so?) parallel universe where "citizens worship skewers and sandwiches." Feelings of lusty post-cake bloat conjured by post-modern idolatry are evocative, tangible, humorous, deliciously tongue-in-cheek, yet altogether uneasy. As viewers and voyeurs, we know how overindulgence leads inevitably to decay: the oversized dentures in Ny By Dentures the antithesis to the cherry-red Big Mac in Lil Marble Burger, and furry geodes a foil to disposable plastic hairbrushes. Moreover, Weitzel's layered work assumes the weight of morality narrative: unmistakably trendy and youthful yet, ultimately, memento mori in an age of excess.
Great, profoundly feminist work from Kemp, Walkup, and Weitzel! None of it should be missed, so stop by Backtalk next time you're near City Target or Powell's!
Above: Jessie Weitzel, Lil Marble Burger; Jessie Weitzel, Ny By Dentures.
Lane Walkup, Wire Sculpture Installation