“I guess I need more blood on the banana,” says cartoonist Nicole Hollander. She’s inspecting one of the tiny plastic murder weapons she’s assembled in an art piece made out of an old set of printer’s drawers. Its title, The Case of the Errant Playboy, is painted in handwriting familiar to readers of her syndicated comic strip, Sylvia.
She seems open to the scenario: “You know, that could happen. It could be an accidental death.”
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She seems surprised by the grimness of this work. Even the mysteries she reads are relatively tame. “I don’t like them to be really bloody,” she says. “I wouldn’t read one with this much blood in it.”
Hollander scavenges at junk stores, garage sales, and hobby shops for figures and toys to serve as actors in her three-dimensional stories as well as for tables and boxes to use as stages. Then she experiments, like a girl playing a twisted version of dollhouse. In one piece she’s placed a dozen rubber monster finger puppets in a box that squishes their heads when the glass lid is closed. “Then I thought, ‘Oh, this elk and this moose could be looking at them,’” she says. So she positioned a plastic moose and elk to gaze at the creatures under the glass. The piece is called Frozen River With Creatures Being Watched by a Moose and an Elk.
The opening reception, with real cake, for Hollander’s exhibit, “Food and Shelter: Cakes, Constructions and Altered Objects,” is from 5 to 8 PM next Friday, January 2, at Artemisia Gallery, 700 N. Carpenter. The show runs through January 31. For information, call 312-226-7323. –Todd Savage
