Strange bulbous creatures appear to creep across the floor in Jo Hormuth’s new installation Frozen Turkey Dinners. Based on balloons folded into various shapes, each looks like it’s ready to pop. Unmistakably sexual, the sculptures seem “to be bursting and throbbing,” according to Hormuth. She also says they’re “democratic”–they seem to have “breasts and penises at the same time.” Arrayed on the floor and on small crates, a few are alone but most are in groups. Creatures atop crates form two semicircles facing two more figures in the center. Some of the creatures resemble actual animals; there’s a cat and mouse and two adorable pigs.
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These creatures look happy, confident; they don’t recognize “the futility of their situation,” Hormuth says, recalling the characters in Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose, one inspiration for the piece. In the movie, Allen’s a theatrical agent who represents a coterie of oddball performers, and he serves them turkey TV dinners on Thanksgiving. One client specializes in the art of making animal shapes by creatively twisting inflated balloons. Hormuth began to read up on the subject and followed the directions in several books. She used her tied balloons to make molds out of dental alginate, and the final works were then cast in white plaster.
Humor has become key to Hormuth’s work. She quotes Man Ray–“humor is the best communicator”–and finds it helps keep her work accessible without having to abandon meaning. “You can be profoundly funny, and I just think it’s much, much better than being profoundly dismal.” It’s also a “coping strategy. A lot of recurrent themes in my work are life, death, sexuality, issues of gender–uncomfortable things.” In our culture breasts and penises are often objects of anxiety as to appearance and size. Her creatures’ confidence plays off of our uneasiness; some have their heads cocked toward the door, acknowledging the viewer’s entrance. “They function as mirrors,” she says, reflecting back “what the viewer wants to see and what the viewer doesn’t want to see–fears or pretenses. They can be very uncomfortable plus being really, really cute.” They’re also rather goofy. But then, Hormuth says, “sometimes you must aim to pop the cork out of art’s rear end.”
