Shana Robbins: Supernatural Conductor

Shana Robbins, Tree Ghost in Iceland 2009, Performance Photograph, Courtesy the artist

By David Everitt Howe

A distinctly Deep-South, fucked-up form of feminism greets visitors to Shana Robbins’s solo exhibition Supernatural Conductor at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Evoking Piotr Uklanski’s show stopper at the 2010 Whitney Biennial (a massive jute and textile exorcism of Polish country craft called Untitled (The Year We Made Contact) (2010)), Robbins rather offers its Georgia alternative: a curtain of antique doilies that forms one part of a larger installation entitled Supernatural Conductor. The piece’s mix of media is a veritable laundry list of kitschy southern thrift-store finds traditionally associated with women’s work: twine, yarn, antique wooden hoops, amethyst geodes, feathers. Behind the hand-stitched screen hangs an oversized dreamcatcher and cruciform twigs forming crude, coiled patches of yarn, while in front a female mannequin dons a hand-made costume (belonging to one of Robbin’s fabricated, mythological female characters: Tree Ghost Figure) marked by a headdress of sprouting branches, a poncho of coffee-stained lace and doilies, military camouflage-cum-leggings, and a pronounced lace codpiece.

For the accompanying super-8 film projection, Robbins dons a mosaic mask of mirror fragments as her Axis Mundi Figure writhes around a fake, reflective tree in the whitewashed, icy landscapes of Iceland. Watercolors, drawings, and c-prints of her performing in rural Georgia and Mexico round out the exhibition. Throughout, Robbins’s correlation of the female body with the natural landscape resuscitates the primal, gendered body art of Marina Abramovic’s Balkan mysteries or Ana Mendieta’s ephemeral rituals. However, perhaps Robbins’s militant, super-bitch femme fatales are more indicative of Alexander McQueen’s female heroines. Subjugated by their own femininity, his hyper-exaggerated figures—strangled in plumes of lace or weighted by overwrought, decorative headpieces—would find good company here; while Robbins’s dramatic juxtapositions of cultural and gender codes seems easy, even slapstick, her flair for the ethnographic skilfully, and with great tact, subsumes southern womanhood into some grotesque variant.

Shana Robbins: Supernatural Conductor is on view at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center until 19 September 2010