waking nightmare on west st. germain

Hypersomnia, a gallery show by Anna Ault, just opened at The Gallery Vault, and it's a terrifying beauty to behold. Although the physical gallery space itself remains the faux cheerfulness of the white gallery cube, but nothing beyond that has even the slightest inkling of cheer, simplicity or even sanity. Rather than visiting a gallery show, the experience of Hypersomnia is more akin to falling into a version of Alice's Wonderland written by Wes Craven with the Mad Hatter played by Heath Ledger's Joker.

Anna's work is a chaotic mess, but that's a credit to it on even the worst of days. When it's great, like in Hypersomnia, you end up with either a visual or conceptual call to madness, a controlled chaos that evokes Hitchcock's Birds and Lévi's Baphomet in equal measure. This makes sense considering both the title and the artist's own struggles with the specter of death at an early age. In these contexts, the works take on a somnolent quality that brings to mind the twisted worlds of Lovecraft's Dream Cycle and the feeling of being trapped in a world of imagination, longing for a return to real life. Chaos reigns here.

The formal quality of the work is predominantly linear, but is balanced by these well known animal images, which draw you out of the visual as soon as it begins to become overwhelming. Birds and goat-demons are simultaneously a threat and a friend for Anna, like an alternatively abusive and loving relationship that one cannot escape from. Fish and snakes are more humorous and playful, to the degree that anything can be in Anna's warped world. Once you have a moment to ponder the meaning of a bizarre image like that of a purple rat in a full hazmat suit devouring the neck of a human man, the tangle of lines and overlapping shapes draw you back in.

This Matisse-like push and pull of image and concept continues as you pass each of the exactingly worked 204 pieces in the show. By the end you're dizzy and profoundly disturbed, and in my case, profoundly affected with a desire for more. Perhaps hearkening just a touch back to the cacophony and speed of the Italian futurists (though without their juvenile love of war and the machine), lines and shapes and collide with printed and drawn matter in a way I'd hesitate to call controlled chaos. A better metaphor, if I'm not overloading you with enough comparisons already, would be to the kaleidoscopic nature of David Lynch's films had he worked with H. R. Giger. One thing leads to another that it shouldn't naturally lead to, but the connections seem to be implied nonetheless.

Anna's work pushes against the Duchampian trend toward minimalism and high concept that characterized the art of the second half of the twentieth century. But it also proves that a formalism of exacting detail need not neglect a gut-punching emotional character. Anna's going places. I'd recommend you get to the show and grab onto her coattails (or, rather, tail feathers).

Hypersomnia is open 12 pm to 3 pm October 16th, 17th and 18th, and The Gallery Vault is located at 708 West St. Germain Street in St. Cloud.

Most of the works in the show are for sale, and the artist can be contacted for price and availability at annaault@yahoo.com