RUSCHWOMAN
May 5 – June 16, 2024
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, May 5, 3–6PM
Outside of the Opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.
Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.
Our relationships with animals, the making of drawings, and the drawings made of animals (be they horse or unicorn or dinosaur or shark or cat) are primeval, non-negotiable, indelible keys to comprehending how we come into the world. In our handling of the relational—with animal kin, foremost—and gestural—beyond language, text, or taxonomy—we discover legible, felt attributes of the formative, unconscious drives by which we not only take on the form of ourselves, but also the templates by which we organize a social system and its attendant capacities for generosity, struggle, collectivity, and beauty. What we do and don’t remember about those pre-conditions get cast forward into dream, proposition, and prophecy; held in between those known and unknown worlds, art serves as an analytic tool to make something and make something meaningful.
And so it is with the newest drawings by Philadelphia-based artist Annette Monnier. Enhancing the always already magical dimensions of the cats we love and others we imagine, Monnier illustrates a mysterious resting spot on the other side of foreboding, situating a feline society into the framework of tarot’s major and minor arcana.
Annette Monnier launched out of her formal art training civically minded and restlessly looking for the ways meaning—ephemeral, lasting, rebellious or optimistic—could be produced from studio practices, the surrounding discourse, the spaces that facilitate the presentation of such artworks and conversations, and the blood-and-sweat sweaty bodies of artists, cultural workers, and cyclists of a gig wrangling precariat class by which those platforms are animated. Landing in Philadelphia, she has exemplified the multivalent interdisciplinarity so venerated by the first two decades of the 21st century: co-founding artist run galleries like Black Floor and Practice, along with steady work arts administrating, developing outreach programs, and writing her ways into muscular stamina and critical nuance have been efforts adjacent to and complimenting Monnier’s own studio work. One way or another, she has spent the past twenty years thinking out loud and in public, speculatively, often collectively, in ways that reveal the radical roles art can play in reflecting on and envisioning better forms of livability at the level of the societal but also at the more intimate scale of home life—the terrarium-like assemblage of animals, plans, objects, rituals, and ghosts that characterize an everyday anecdotal that somehow, every day, knocks sideways into the elegant and very weird.
Monnier’s drawings keep things simple in crisp black lines on white sheets, while compounding complications into complications into an orgy of ornament in a wunderkammer of maximalist details. In the early 2000s, when the artist was navigating punk AF, insecure housing in West Philadelphia and exploring the potential of scrappy but earnest La Bohème community, her drawings grew into densely populated records of the artist-run and alternative arts and social scene of the city—like if Aubrey Beardsley illustrated the social-calendar ruminations of Dorothy Parker’s 1933 New Yorker short story, “Diary of a Lady.” Veering past caricature into the measured, deliberate mark-making of storybook illustration, in drawings like Time Loops at Lost Bar and and Black Floor Gallery, 2003–2007 Monnier documents (with romantic, fantastical flourish) the hip denizens of art-inclined intelligentsia within their milieu. In these illustrated crowd scenes, Monnier links up centuries-old uses of art as portrait and as history-building in a cunning dialogue with the emergent frameworks for engaging the social that followed on Nicolas Bourriaud’s late-90s ‘relational aesthetics’ turn. New achievement unlocked! Drawing not only as annotation, adjacent to writing, or as description, or even provisionality, but as social artifact, fully charged with storytelling (and by extension, world building) potential.
As the 2000s were crashing into housing crisis, economic recession, North Korean nuclear testing, and Barack Obama’s arrival as President, Monnier’s work was in a crucial stage of development, enlisting homemade audio book cassettes into bead curtains, IKEA sheets as drawing supports, and haute trashy artificial-ephemeral floral arrangements to serve as debased monuments to an America in upheaval. Drawing meandered through this period as a baseline at which the artist processed the world around her. Memorably, on a panel concerned with dialogues and definitions around craft and ‘high art’ at Abington Art Center, Annette Monnier was joined in conversation with color-installation-maven Polly Apfelbaum and former creative director of Martha Stewart Magazine Joele Cuyler, along with other artists in the sweeping exhibition on view, The HandMaking.
But drawing was there long before, and in even the earliest of them, so were cats. Monnier reflects on a critical moment in the origin story that has led to her upcoming RUSCHWOMAN exhibition in the form of Cats vs. Dinosaurs, a two-person exhibition with Gerik Forston at Black Floor Gallery aforementioned, in 2005. Sharpie marker drawings of cats on prefab canvases filled Monnier’s part of the show, complimented by a wall mural of a giant house cat facing off with Forston’s own depictions of T-Rexes.
In subsequent years, cats along with skulls, fanciful foxes, and witches have populated Monnier’s intricately detailed pen renderings. As with many creatives working at close range with the world’s toughest realities around corruption, deprivations, and injustices at multiple, simultaneous scales, one finds the worlds depicted by Monnier opening outward into cognitive abstractions, while persistently anchored in a precision and deliberation of gesture redolent of sage eccentric Edward Gorey and sly conceptualist Aleksandra Mir. When history fails (to hold, to represent, to teach, to provoke revolution), fantasy and fabulation are the tools by which counternarratives are inscribed into being. The places where ideology and insistence come up short, magic and speculation provide a productive out.
In an era where myriad versions of tarot decks proliferate (my local queer-oriented comic and zine shop currently has 28 different artist-made decks on offer), Monnier’s drawings of cats cross the idiosyncrasy of T. S. Eliot’s collection of cat-themed poetry with the visual richness and mystique of highly compartmentalized Korean chaekgeori pictures. Cats sitting, sipping, staring, slinking, squinting, reclining, lying, napping, and snoozing are rendered with knowing, feline winks at Louis Wain, Laurel Burch, and a plethora of ‘cat lady’ and ‘cat lad’ artists winding in and out of art canon proper, sometimes to be found relegated unfairly into the popular arts. Even the New Age Goop consumer and witchcraft capitalist are nodded to in the mainstreaming of tarot as a ritual, as an app, even as an upcoming horror (releasing the same weekend as RUSCHWOMAN’s opening for Annette Monnier). The artist, one could say, has stepped up to the zeitgeist, finding the semiotic of cat and the talismanic suggestiveness of tarot as key interlocutors for our present symbolic order.
Within such vaulted meaning-making, Monnier’s felines are mischievous: overturned vases, centerfold leg spreading, and mangled miniblinds are just some of the vestigial evidence of these cards’ association with catastrophe. And yet, for whatever environmental dangers suggested in each drawings’ assembled clues, the world Monnier makes for her cat drawings to inhabit is one of relaxed repose. The outcome of every attempted reading reaffirms rest, self care, and lovely compositions of coexistence and even interdependence. Whatever else the future holds, however rocked our social or ecosystemic, the recommendations are: drink water, perform spa-like ablutions, cuddle, and nap.