KIKI LAWRIE: LITTLE QUEENS

The fantastic caracter is related to the relationship with the ordinary.
Something becomes more fantastic when it’s only an appearance. You see it, and that’s about it.*2

Description

The serie  Pinturas - objetos de pequeño formato* (Pictures – objects of small format) investigates the theme of the female body as a trace and dress. Reliefs, collages and constructions allude to the bitter parable of women´s social and historical conditions. “In the age of fifteen we all wanted to be princesses or just married queens …”  The woman in her postmodern rol forms part in the process of disenchantement of her former predisposed destiny.
This work is about interpretations through materials which reproduce and recreate portraits and models of women during the history of art. They include noblewomen, works of Verones, Delacroix, Goya up to the wedding dress of the artist´s grandmother. All of them are queens and princesses which have their base in children´s fantasies and then converted nearly into mandates of female identity.
The artist recreates these models with common materials reminding us of activities which are not  “glamourous” at all. She displaces the ideal women by female models who aren´t neither queens nor princesses. She refers to human beings –female or male- who try to fulfil themselves in their simple history: a common life with a holy caracter. Recognizing this value, their intent doesn´t lose its essential nucleus and raw material.
With the object to imitate the noble portraits, perishable and fragile materials, urban garbage, broken shop windows and windscreens collected in the city, steel and metal plate leftovers from factories, nails, rivets, rosty wire, kitchen cloths and safety pins are mixed with lace edgings and gold foil. The materials are pasted on the canvas and pieces of lace, golden threads, pearls and little precious stones refer to the sunny side of the queens. If you look at the pictures from a smaller distance though, the shining substances already reflect the danger.
The body is absent as its appearance is culturally constructed by the dress. The artist explores the meaning of the clothes in their singularity. From the moment we are human beings, we are also cultural beings who are dressed in a special way.  
The written passages on the pictures, taken from poems or dramas, remind us that women will never become princesses and refer to Gabriela Mistral´s expresión that “we all will be queens and reach the seaside.”
Queens created of bullets, erotic corsets with rose petals, brides dressed with dowry clothes seem to be fragile figures, lonely and precarious symbols for a society in crisis. A never-ending world…
Kiki Lawrie

. . The disillusion of the idea of happiness not only belongs to women but to every human being. We ask ourselves why we live, when we will be happy and the happiness is always somewhere else. The loneliness, the frustration and the wish of something ideal which as we know already will never arrive, an essential part of the human being´s conditions.
. . .The inmediate delight created by the object or the material does not stay for a long time. It changes to fields which the audience sometimes does not want to see. Fields of doubts. Bodies of evidence which unfold but don´t finish. As life itself – things dissolve but the don´t resolve. Vertigo… if you only could know it.*2

*from 20cm x 25 cm to 50cm x 60cm x and 6cm of depth.
*2 Daniel Veronese, refering to A. Chejov, cit. from the cultural magazine Ñ,25.6.2005