Cypress College poses world’s easiest question

WHO KILLED BAMBI?

“Who Killed Bambi?” may be the world’s easiest riddle. He hanged himself on a block of ice? The poison was in the ice cubes? Bambi was a polar bear? No. Fine answers all, but not the ones we’re looking for. You killed Bambi. Duh!

Ass!

“Bambi” is a little bit ecology, a whole lot of kitsch, all wrapped up shiny and neat with dead things for us to pet and peruse—though you have to do your petting on the sly. The Office’s Chris Hoff, curating here for Cypress College, took a bunch of feminists and practically had them dancing naked in the moonlight in the forest primeval, capturing the 21st century version of the Cult of Dionysus shroom-fueled blood orgies. He couldn’t have hit a combination more guaranteed to win my love if he’d raided my bedroom for its glitter paintings of gay cowboy cock.

All you have to do is solve Cypress College’s greatest stumper of all: figuring out where to park.

Cypress’s small gallery has been transformed into a forest of cardboardish tree forms for you to rampage among your very own self, but the art’s only on the walls. Your first taste is by the appropriately stripper-named Mindi Cherri, who glams up small, sad racks of antlers with painstaking (OCD, even) rows of Swarovski crystals and touches of mink. One set is all rose, another sky blue, while a third is a striking amethyst. It’s a very Laurie Hassold view of the world—Hassold used to fashion Virgins Mary from used Trojans, and butterflies from her menstrual blood, when she wasn’t sewing wings from dead birds onto rocks, dropping them off buildings and calling them Flight. In this case, Cherri glams up death with the favored accoutrements of high-end flip-flop designers everywhere. Pretty! Pretty dead!

Liz Young takes photographic targets from Delta Corp.’s archery division and stitches shadowy pictures over them. Deer Target: Birds has a bunch of threatening, nasty crows stitched over it. Deer Target: Artificial Respiration has a man’s back and shoulders—with someone else’s foot and hands in the air over him? It’s unclear! (Because it’s Abstract!) Turkey Target: My Pets has a homily embossed in red string, like a Home Sweet Home pillow, but the string hangs loose, running down like blood in a horror movie poster. The animals I’ve trapped, it reads, have all become my pets.

Diana Markessinis is the only artist in the show who doesn’t imbue her works with grinning death: her works are small mixed-media pieces, collages of tree branches with the skies shining through from behind in electric, brilliant colors like fluorescent blue and medium magenta and Cadmium orange. They’re peaceful and pretty, a forest world that can never exist, except in Terabithia, maybe.

And my longtime favorite Carrie Yury, who likes to shoot women letting it hang out in all their bruised, cottage-cheese-assed, shaving-stubbled glory (foreshadowing the long-waited comeback of Britney Spears), here goes impersonal and mysterious. Her Traces series are large-scale photos, beautifully shot, in wondrous magnification. We can tell some of the elements in her saturated color palette—what blurs in the foreground will resolve into gigantic blades of grass in the middle distance. But others are unknown, and disturbing. The glistening pile of red in the grass in Traces (Lawn)—is it a heap of fresh-killed meat? Or merely a crushed pomegranate? In Traces (Trees), it’s a smashed papaya, but it gives the vibe of an egg that’s fallen from the nest. And in Traces (Hill), I’ve absolutely no idea. There wouldn’t be a dead crab on that knoll, right? Even if Yury’s only murdered fruit for her series, it still reeks of nature at its ugliest and most vicious, the kind of Dionysian stench that brings the scavengers, sniffing for carrion and ready to rend meat with their teeth. And it’s just as pretty as could be.

“WHO KILLED BAMBI?”CYPRESS COLLEGE ART GALLERY | 9200 VALLEY VIEW ST | CYPRESS 90630 | OPEN MON-THURS 10AM-2PM AND TUES-WED 6-8PM | THROUGH SEPT 27

Tags: bambi, cypress college, feminists, post-feminists