Eye Candy: Christopher Stribley’s “You Ought to be in Pictures”
Brooklyn-based artist Christopher Stribley’s “You Ought to be in Pictures” (2011) is a monumental homage to Edith Beale. The six-by-five foot collage explores her disquieting appeal by magnifying a Grey Gardens documentary still of pitiable Edie captured in three-quarter view, arms akimbo, chirping the Ziegfield Follies song that gives this work its title.
Beale is remembered as flaky layers of rough and refined. Bare cardboard peeks through richly textured, gessoed, red and pink handmade papers patterned in paisley. Coffee and tea-stained pages from a 1973 psychological manual on Schizophrenia entitled “Cognitive Transformation” serve as flesh tones for a face whose energy feels suppressed.
While soft colors and simplified gradations of light define Beale’s figure from afar, the materials’ edges whisk away from the picture plane and cast shadow patterns that invite the viewer to make a closer inspection. The jarring contrasts between the medical text’s descriptions of paranoia, and the elaborate folds of paper that form Beale’s glamorous headscarf are increasingly engrossing. The surface spectacle makes it easy to forget that they are parts of a bigger picture.
Stribley lets the viewer lose all sense of Beale’s humanity on purpose. One certainly sees the fractured Edie from her famous documentary, whose delusions of grandeur and obsession with wealth were dreadfully fanned and punished by a domineering mother. Yet because of the absorption he encourages, Stribley suggests the exploitative nature of the documentary itself, and the genesis of an American obsession to chart the Beale clan’s dysfunctionality, and perpetual fall from grace.
“You oughta be in pictures” is fittingly material. The composition’s intricacies ask that we reflect equally as much on the tragedy of Edie’s lunacy as its process of making and remaking.
See work by Christopher Stribley and Morten Hemmingsen in “I’ve Got My Game Plan Working,” at Munch Gallery, 245 Broome St., through September 3rd
