Lunchtime Art Talk in Woolworth Window, By Acataphasia Grey

Bring your lunch, discuss Natural History and Arts!

WHO: Artist Acataphasia (“Cat”) Grey – and you!
WHAT: Brown bag Lunch de la Mort (“Lunch of Death”)
WHEN: Noon-1pm, Jan. 31
WHERE: Inside Cat’s art installation at the Woolworth Windows, corner of 11th & Commerce
ADMISSION: Free
Bring your lunch and step inside an Artscapes installation! Talk about natural history with artist Cat Grey, and discuss her macabre new work, Spiderhorse. It will be standing room only inside the Woolworth window, but you will leave with a bone, feather or fluffy souvenir to take home. Bring a sack lunch, an open mind and all your questions about all things dead!

This exhibit is filled with skulls, bones, quills, furs, feathers, and antlers from numerous animal species, exotic and local.   

Acataphasia is a teeming wealth of knowledge on the science, politics, and artistry of all things dead.

 

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Cat Grey Dissects How to “Own the Nightmare”

By Lisa Kinoshita

Cat Grey’s nightmarish “SpiderHorse” is tacked up with the remains of a lady’s antique sidesaddle.

Now on exhibit at the Woolworth Windows is Acataphasia Grey‘s most wickedly clever effort to date, “Own the Nightmare”. This installation is Grey’s stated attempt to disarm the subconscious terrors and monstrosities that occur in sleep by materializing them with her own bare hands. Inside the window at 11th & Commerce, her life-size, belligerently grotesque “SpiderHorse” (created last year for the AMC “competitive taxidermy” reality show, Immortalized) wakens strange intimations indeed. Two quotes about dreams neatly lend themselves as bookends for this work.

Taking apart the subconscious. Photo: Gabriel Brown

The first is from 19th-century writer and author of Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: “My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.” The second is from four-star general Colin Powell: “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination and hard work.” With a studio stocked with her trademark dead animal parts and antique curiosities awaiting assignment, Grey has the poetic imagination and temperament to drag the most wild-eyed nightmare bucking and rearing into the light of day. But, also the disciplined vision of a military man, one whose first words uttered in the crib might’ve been “No guts, no glory.”

Grey explains that SpiderHorse grew out of a competitive challenge on Immortalized; her assignment was called, “Your Worst Nightmare”.

Grey attempted to outgross the competition on “Immortalized”, a reality show. Photo: Gabriel Brown

First, she tweezed the concept of mare out of “nightmare” for her project. Then, “in order to embrace the theme I tried to make sure there was something horrible in there for everyone, no matter who. Aren’t scared of spiders? Fine, I have more for you. How about things with pincers? How about too many eyes [SpiderHorse has four], and eyes looking out through stitches? Skin staples – anyone who has seen them on a loved one while waiting for them to wake up in the ER should appreciate that one…Smaller spiders are boiling up from under the back of the couch (ever worried about what can hide in the cushions)? How about the fact that this horrendous thing is in your space, where it clearly does not belong?” Ok, ok, we get the point. Grey says the installation will continue to evolve (replicate? fester? pustule?) over the next three months.

The parallel with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley goes further. Like SpiderHorse, the British writer’s literary classic, Frankenstein, was the product of an intense competition – this one famously between artistic friends encamped for a holiday in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva. The group included her future husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; a physician, John Polidori; and Lord Byron, who proposed that rather than trade supernatural tales around the fire at his villa over the long summer, they lift their pens and “each write a ghost story.”

Gutsy Tacoma artist takes on t.v. taxidermy challenge

Barnyard animals bring out the best in taxidermy enthusiast, Cat Grey. Photo: Vicky Winters

It’s official – Tacoma artist Acataphasia Grey will star on Immortalized, a new reality show about the world of competitive taxidermy debuting February 14, 2013, on AMC. “Cat” was shooting in Los Angeles last month, one of eight challengers on the program, whose formula she compares to the insanely popular Iron Chef. Although there is no cash award for the winner, contestants fight tooth and nail “for bragging rights at the top of their field,” she says.

Grey is no stranger to show business. Now a full-time artist, she was once the art director of a Bainbridge Island production company where she managed projects such as shooting video for M-TV. In 2010, she got a call from Go Go Luckey Entertainment, a Los Angeles-based production company specializing in reality and scripted television, asking her to brainstorm ideas for a reality show about “rogue taxidermy”. Not only did she seed concepts, eventually she was invited (in a final format unfamiliar to her) to be a contestant on the show along with other experienced taxidermy artistes.

Party animals: vignettes like this one on the streets of Paris have inspired Cat Grey. Photo courtesy of the artist

Grey’s ironic flair with deceased and/or stuffed animals has been on display in Tacoma in elaborate installations based on Victorian tea parties, created with support from the Spaceworks program. She lives here with her cat, Mr. James Peterson.

Her earliest contact with “taxidermy and preservation” was as a child growing up in Australia. When she was 15, a family rabbit died, and she began experimenting “with alum and things like that.” But her trials were repeatedly interrupted by a grandmother’s dog who had a penchant for eating her experiments.

Grey says she didn’t mind her trials being destroyed by the dog because her aesthetic goals always outpaced her scientific ones: “The process didn’t interest me at all, it was the results I wanted.”

Acataphasia Grey’s dyspeptic Thanksgiving

“Thanksgiving” by Cat Grey

The artist Acataphasia Grey stages parlor scenes that resemble surrealist nocturnes. Couple that penchant with an exotic name that could pass for an eating disorder, and it makes perfect sense to discover just how disorderly her Thanksgiving kitchen can be.

Grey photographed the still-wriggling(!) ham to the left while preparing it for the holiday table. (Possible dinner theme: Eat or be eaten.) She claims to have plans for a “traditional” dinner with family, but with a few twists thrown in as well.

“Every year my friends in Monroe insist we all go to a local corn maze and eat a slice of ‘the very best pumpkin pie anywhere!’ I haven’t the heart to tell them it’s not baked there, and comes from Costco.”

Though she gives it her personal best in the kitchen (at least when it comes to wide-eyed hams), Grey claims mixed feelings about the holidays. “People brood over how well the year didn’t go, and why they are alone…Or, perhaps this is a scene of solitary joy, free at last from obligation.

“Ask the ham. It knows.”

A Tea Party Radical

This tea party in Paris inspired the art work of Acataphasia Grey. Photo by Cat Grey

The first thing you notice about the artist Acataphasia Grey is an air of twisted opulence; it tinges everything from her formal way of speaking, to her complicated name, from “a medical Latin term that basically means, ‘Being able to form complete sentences in your head but not say them out loud.'” And that’s before you see the doleful, three-eyed stuffed bunnies she makes, or photos of the surrealist Old World tea party she convened, attended by taxidermy zebras and assorted other African game.

Cat Grey goes for baroque.

This creator of phantasmagoria confesses to a penchant for the past, “Specifically, the rage for ‘cabinets of curiosities’ that the Victorians were so particularly fond of, and the taxonomy collectors. The unusual being regarded as special, or better than normal.” Grey’s own unique brand of taxonomy will be on exhibit in a Spaceworks Tacoma installation, Tea for Short Expectations, opening March 15. “I envision a clandestine gathering of mutant animals: drinking tea, eating sugar cubes or upsetting the cream in an atmosphere of secrecy and safety,” she muses. Alice in Wonderland gone awry? The scene will be partially obscured “to enhance the feeling that this is a glimpse into a private world, not commonly seen, but perhaps going on all around you.”

A soft toy by Cat Grey

Grey glides like a changeling between the self-created worlds and time periods she inhabits. In a previous life, she was art director of a Bainbridge Island production company where she oversaw projects ranging from an M-TV music video to the transformation of a defunct bar into a fabulous set for a Bombay Sapphire gin shoot. She has been a full-time artist for several years.

In addition to her large-scale art, Grey creates original soft toys; stuffed animals that, while cuddly, could be read as the abandoned playthings of an ill-fated dystopia. “‘Bunnies’ is my generic term for any stuffed animal,” she says. “I look at them and my goal is to ‘fix’ them, so that they have teeth at last, or better eyes, or many, many eyes…I could say that the objective is to whisper, ‘Hey, it’s perfectly alright to like this better because it has two heads. You are not alone.'” Enter the world of Acataphasia Grey at www.morbidtendencies.com. Tea for Short Expectations, Opera Alley, March 15 through July 1.