Vadis Turner’s “Burial Party” at Manhattan’s Lyons Wier Gallery

From Vadis Turner's "Burial Party"

Artist Vadis Turner has long specialized in re-visualizing the everyday from a subversive, feminist perspective. Her 2009 piece “Vanity: My Beautiful Education,” presented an almost violently arrayed set of sculptures, composed of materials such as tampons, fake eyelashes, fake fingernails, and cuticle scissors made from origamied college diplomas.

Now Turner has turned her attention to the adornments of death. Her latest installation, “Burial Party,” features a selection of sculptures and textiles constructed from sashes, satin ribbons, and other funereal adornments, such as faux pearls. The walls are dotted with messy mock-burial shrouds and surrealistic gray corsages; suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room is a human form, wrapped in red satin strips and draped with artificial white flowers. A clutch of white and blue party balloons attached to the figure’s back appears to suspend the body about three feet above the floor.

"Ash Corsage," Vadis Turner

In Vadis Turner’s work, provocative rearrangements of everyday paraphernalia, i.e. a multi-tiered wedding cake constructed from clean white tampons, often present momentous-yet-clichéd events under an uncomfortably taboo light. “Burial Party” continues this tradition: in her own words, “elements of ceremonial adornment are partnered with processes of decay.” She refigures the “ceremonial adornments” to display what they are conventionally designed to distract from.

"Ripe Earthfresh Burial," Vadis Turner

Turner’s work does not seek elegance. The dense shrouds of ribbons are perhaps little more than graceless knots. The static nature of the central human figure does not offer the uplifting message of rebirth some gallery viewers might expect from a show concerning our final passage. Instead, these pieces force us to reconsider an uncomfortable cultural tradition. They remind us of the carefully concealed evidence of mortality that exists inside elegant pinewood caskets, beneath clean green plots of grass, and within elaborately crafted urns.

It is with good reason that death is considered “the last taboo.” Nobody likes to think about it, and nobody likes to talk about it. But if we’re ever to arrive at true peace with death, we must force ourselves not to look the other way. It is for this reason artists like Vadis Turner, and installations like her “Burial Party,” are essential to the conversation.

Vadis Turner: Burial Party runs through May 7^th, 2011 at Manhattan’s Lyons Wier Gallery, 542 West 24^th Street.