Joy Bush
“Water Bird”
Beanie Babies have returned and landed in Westville.
The pellet-stuffed collectible toys from the 1990s are the subjects of documentary photographer Joy Bush. Her exhibition, Caravaggio’s Toys, opens at the DaSilva Gallery on Whalley Avenue Jan. 10 and runs through the end of the month.
For the exhibition, Bush photographed the four-inch cuddly creatures against a velvety dark background and lit them from above in a yellowish cone of illumination, thus applying the dramatic, film-noirish lighting style associated with the late Renaissance or early Baroque bad-boy painter Michelangelo da Caravaggio to a pretty banal subject.
“Amphibian”
Or as Bush puts it in her artist’s statement: “With the employment of chiaroscuro lighting and the placement of each toy in the camera’s frame, I give larger than life importance and seriousness to these stuffed, lowbrow figures. The series extols the quality of light in the photographic image while maintaining a lively subtext of humor.”
But satire’s a tricky, ephemeral thing; as George S. Kaufman, one of its best practitioners said, “satire is what closes on Saturday night.” Does treating Beanie Babies like Renaissance portraits do the trick? Would it be funnier if the Beanie Baby parrot had a miter on its head? Or if the octopus was holding a scepter, or playing a lute?
In a previous series of photographs, of Holy Land in Waterbury, Bush used her camera in a fascinating and heartbreaking manner to explore the passage of time. She visited the place once every five years over a period of 30 years. Stephen Kobasa called Bush’s work there a “meditation on the ruins of belief.”
Those photographs attained some of their power by evoking a sense of what has been lost or missing beyond all hope of recapture. The Beanie Babies images don’t, and perhaps can’t, have that power or effect. Bush knows this. “Part of my interest in Holy Land,” she said, “was not just because of its history; some of it had to do with the many changes in structure, and witnessing its erosion and deterioration. The toys stayed the same.” Indeed, they look as good as the ones for sale on eBay.
Perhaps that’s what’s missing. Compared to the Holy Land images, the Beanie Baby images don’t feel “loved,” even though Bush has obviously showered them with what she calls the full “integrity” of techniques and attention from her artistic quiver.
That said, “Bird #1” grew to be my favorite over an hour of looking. Its combed forward, vain crest drew me in. It seemed puzzled, as if asking, “what am I doing here?”
I have great respect for the author however totally disagree with this review. On the contrary, I think that nothing is missing! I feel Joy Bush is using light (instead of literal and obvious objects of Renaissance painters such as quill pen or book that illustrating their trade or interests) as a stand in to reference human characteristics through subtle actions such as "prayer or desire " (radiating light and positioning of elephant paws), "containment" (the fish emerging out of darkness in possibly an illusion of a tank), "contemplation" (the ape), "pondering" (the frog) etc. Its both humorous and profound work. Chiaro (light) scuro (darkness) also comments indirectly on good (cuddly) and evil (extinction).