Leah Poller: Bed…Not Bored
The 19 beds now on view at Portals gallery are part of a larger series that Poller began a year ago called “One Hundred and One Beds,” a fanciful allusion to surrealist Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Woman. While the series numbers about 30 so far, Poller has already come up with more than 100 titles.
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The 52-year-old Poller recalls being greatly impressed by the stone sculptures and ceramics during an early visit to the Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City. She was stunned to find the ancient works “so spiritually powerful, so connected to some unspoken language of humanity” that they overwhelmed the “aesthetic” European paintings with which she was familiar. Moving to Paris, she enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts, where she received traditional training in figurative sculpture, though the sculptures she did subsequently–she remained in Paris for 18 years, returning to the U.S. in 1990–don’t sound particularly traditional. In one, she recalls, “a young girl who was beautiful was self-conscious about that so I made her shoulders like the crenellated walls of a fortress,” a “metamorphosis” effect she employed with other figures as well.
There is something deconstructive about the free play allowed words, objects, and symbols in Poller’s beds. By always pushing the limits, she not only creates surprise and humor but suggests that the power of the art object transcends any of the specific meanings that can be attached to it.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photos of “Flagrant Delit” and “Brass Bed”.
