“Summer Fling”
Art Palace, through July 12
It’s a teen magazine’s favorite summer headline: “Summer Fling or the Real Thing? How to know if love will last.” Below this headline, a heavily clichéd story will tell of young love, sparked at the beach, the pool, or the park … and of course, of that first sun-bathed kiss. Buried in the midst of all of this knee-deep nostalgia and sticky-sweet sentiment is the primary assumption that each summer’s boy-meets-girl story is universal. When the teen writer crows, “She was 16, and I was 15 and totally smitten,” you already know what’s coming. And as he launches into the rest, “It only lasted three weeks, but it was three weeks I will never forget. We met by accident. She was flying a kite with her sister, and they hadn’t even noticed me sitting there. What happened after that is like a dream …,” he hopes you are wishing to yourself, “If only we could all be so lucky.”
The Art Palace’s current show, “Summer Fling,” curated by Austin painter extraordinaire Ali Fitzgerald, plays off some of this goopy innocence. Yes, the show is about youth: The artists featured are all recent graduates of UT’s undergraduate program in studio art. But if you want to say the show is about love, this outstanding group of works will first ask you to define your terms. The point being that summer lovin’ is not always what it is cracked up to be.
Take Senalka McDonald’s work, to begin with. In one of her larger pieces, Hamilton Park, a looming woman, whose face is masked behind her hair, sits on a park bench with a young boy. If you look first at his wide-eyed and panicked stare, you won’t be surprised to see the woman’s hand placed squarely over the boy’s zipper. And if you’ve seen the related exposé on Oprah, this story of a grandmother molesting her grandson will already be familiar. Moving on to a smaller series by McDonald, using a foregrounding technique that leaves the figures far from the presumed safety of their suburban homes, story after story of sordid sexual abuse is made both poignant and public. McDonald’s sharp and stunning paper collage hardly depicts summer love, but it certainly draws out something you’d wish was a passing fling.
Christa Palazzolo’s work takes a different slant on summer’s first sweet kiss. What happens for example, when the boy-meets-girl story meets gender redefinition? Are the same universal assumptions about love and sunshine still plausible? Works such as Feminine Ideal ask who precisely are those fresh summer selves falling in love anyway? Surely gender identity was never as clear as past pinups and fabled summer love stories made out? In Christa Lee and Cari Lynn, two outstanding paintings by Palazzolo and her twin sister, the often simple nature of sex identity fumbles. One portrays one of the twins in her mother’s too-big-for-her bra, skirt, and heels, while the other has the other twin posing in her dad’s cowboy boots, cut-off shorts, and bold red, “boyish” windbreaker. If gender roles are learned by parroting one’s parents, what happens to summer love when at least one of two identical young kids makes a sexual switcheroo?
In two of the show’s largest works, Randy Muniz works off stills from the movies 81Ú2 and Fight Club to create pieces that might define that inevitable crash at love’s end. His skill with charcoal and the sheer size of the pieces are impressive, and he seems to be defining a way of his own in manipulating the stills into images of men bound in cattle cars before the viewing eyes of the gentrified animals driving cars and trucks below. While lust, if not love, can reduce us to our inner animal nature, the role of voyeurism is called into question in Muniz’s largest and untitled work.
So is it back to the teen mags or through the thick of the many rethinks of desire, lust, love, and sexuality challenged in the Summer Fling? As this is one of Art Palace’s strongest shows yet and is, as the title suggests, as fleeting as its subject matter, I suggest you quickly take a look at that ever elusive “real thing” that is at once as disturbing, pleasurable, and seductive as art in Austin can get.
This article appears in June 30 • 2006.