Shari Hatt: Clowning Around

There’s something uniquely unsettling about clowns. It could be the comic grotesque of their exaggerated features or the performance extremes of their merry-making gags. Or perhaps this trepidation comes from a deeper sense of uncertainty: Who is behind that makeup? What exactly are they going to do next? And what makes them want to do it?

Halifax-based artist Shari Hatt offers one plausible explanation for the methods behind clownish madness in the title to her exhibition of recent clown portraits at the Alberta College of Art and Design’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery—“I just want to be taken seriously as an artist.” Hatt is best known for her award-winning photo portraits of show and celebrity dogs, which, with uncanny anthropomorphism, capture the steadfast devotions and ironic clichés of pet culture. Her photo series titled Liberace’s Closet looked at the famously flamboyant trappings of the celebrity performer. And in another recent project, Hatt pictured the character acts of circus sideshows. So this move to photographing clowns makes sense; it neatly combines the detailed formalism of her portrait work with a closer study of self-fashioned identities, performance subcultures and the social effect of the entertainment spotlight.

The exhibition presents a veritable rogues’ gallery of character creations: the jolly faced Cheezie the Clown, the mischievous hobo Kinko the Clown and the manic Tigger the Traumatized Clown, among others. But even in the outlandish surface humour of her portraits, Hatt’s subjects remain askew, carrying a dark if subversive undertone. Tigger, for instance, proudly displays the scars of open-heart surgery; Kinko’s impish grin barely distracts from the noose hanging around his neck; Cheezie’s distorted costume and amplified expression, not to mention his boozy-red nose, hint at deeply set instability. In all of the portraits, the standards of clownish charm become a psychologically charged depiction of individual identity both real and created.

The joke is on the art world in a companion video piece featuring professional clowns delivering art-related gags that, despite some classic hijinks and slapstick routines, fall purposely flat. As the gallery text states, “Each joke becomes emptier, another hollow gesture, both distant and abstract.”

No less of a sly art-world humourist is Vancouver artist and recent Sobey Art Award winner Tim Lee, whose work is featured concurrently in the touring exhibition “Remakes, Variations (1741–2049).” (1407 14 Ave NW, Calgary AB)

 

Shari Hatt Cheezie the Clown from the series Clown Portraits 2006