Curators’ note: In conjunction with “Merrilee Hortt: Small Vanities,” the Capital City Arts Initiative is delighted to present the essay below by Gregory Crosby. Mr. Crosby is an arts writer and cultural critic, currently living in New York City. His writing for a broad range of Las Vegas publications has been instrumental in helping fuel and promote the cultural renaissance of what locals in the Las Vegas art scene have appropriately dubbed “The Radiant City”. Our thanks go to Mr. Crosby for his contribution to “Small Vanities”.

The stormy head of the Bride of Frankenstein hovers above a small group of zebras on the move, like a weird Gothic cloud above the veldt. “Winged Victory” stands in its headless splendor while regarded by a flamingo, a crane, a seagull. Tiny clowns take pratfalls before a towering ridge of beer bottles. Three twisting candles hold themselves upright casting long shadows in search of a birthday cake. Lips align themselves with a wood screw, or a contortionist aligns himself with a pair of scissors, or a bullfrog with a revolver, each in an elaborate patterned proscenium of peach halves or string beans. It must mean something—literally so in the case of the latter images, dubbed “It Must Mean Something (Gun)” or “It Must Mean Something (Profile).” And it does: it means that someone is paying attention.

That’s what artists do, of course, a faculty so obvious as to seem almost counter-intuitive. When much of contemporary art seems mired in a deliberate vagueness—casual, glancing, insipid in either concept or execution—it’s the artist who simply finds the salient or unexpected detail and vividly renders it that most captures our own attention. The artist who makes grand gestures out of very small ones, and does it without ever seeming grand herself. Having experienced Merrilee Hortt’s works on paper for over a decade, I’m always simultaneously surprised and knowingly satisfied by her attentiveness, and the skill with which she transmutes it into pictures that are rich, complex and mysterious without ever becoming unnecessarily showy or cheaply shocking.

The kind of shock Hortt trades in is a quiet one: the shock of recognition, coupled with a split-second sense that you have no idea what you’re looking at, even though the object is clearly a fork, its twines casting sinister (why sinister?) shadows. In her “Small Vanities” series of drawings, each object—a rose, a bicycle horn, a swatch of fabric—is both itself and something more. Somehow Hortt captures the varied associations, emotional and rhetorical, that abound in everyday things. We would see these associations bubble up into our minds constantly, if we ever stopped long enough to regard a pair of salt and pepper shakers or a fortune cookie the way Merrilee Hortt does. We would revel for a moment in our inescapable materialism—our attachments to the little things that make the world not just easier or better, but in a sense possible. The cliché claims its no good to be hung up on mere things, but things are the pegs we hang our bodies and senses on: the physical world that without which a spiritual dimension would be meaningless.

Hortt is well attuned to this, and deftly re-focuses the viewer’s attention on the connections between the world around us and ourselves, connections that are so matter-of-course they might as well be breathing. And like breathing, which becomes quietly miraculous when you pause and focus on your own lungs, expanding and contracting, Hortt makes little miracles out of juxtapositions of sight and sensation, as in “Self Portrait as a Teal Dress” and “Self Portrait as a Blue Dress.” Here, Merrilee Hortt pulls and squeezes her own face until it resembles the folds in fabric: flesh becomes fashion and vice versa. Or she draws attention to language and its intentions and representations: in “Handout/Hand Out” a mottled old hand extends as if in greeting above the stylized hand of a palmistry map. In one of her most strangely poignant and funny images, “A Marriage,” white elephants waltz in awkward embraces in the foreground while a still life of varied candles in elaborate holders loom above them in the darkness. The image is packed with so many intimations of marriage’s mortality and endurance: its memories and brief flickering loves and desires, and its absurdities.

It’s important to note another obvious factor in Hortt’s ability to so vigorously communicate her deep attentiveness: she can draw like the devil. Her work, rendered in graphite and gouache, in silverpoint and pastel, is sharply observed yet delicately shaded and full of nuance. She seems less interested in line than in form, but it’s with form—with her ability to make objects present and shadowy at the same time—that she is able to draw the reader into the picture. A bold graphic design sense would merely realistically represent, say, that thumbtack or drill bit without evoking the associations that are contained in “thumbtack” or a “drill bit.”

There’s something deceptively simple in Hortt’s ability to remake and re-engage the world with simply a pencil and a few objects. It seems so effortless, but don’t be fooled. There’s nothing harder—or more essential—for an artist than to simply pay attention. Merrilee Hortt’s drawings perfectly demonstrate the rewards—for herself, and for the viewer—that such attention pays.

Gregory Crosby
New York, New York
February 2005

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