Cynthia Consentino
About seven years ago Cynthia Consentino read a study that has figured in much of her work since: five-year-olds were asked which animal best represented them. “The boys identified with animals that were predatory, and the girls with animals that were cute and cuddly,” she says. “One girl even answered with a flower. I thought that there would also be girls who wanted to be tigers, but then I remembered loving playing a flower in a school play at that age.” She began to create ceramic sculptures that played with gender stereotypes; in 2001’s Wolf Girl I she put a wolf’s head on a girl in pink clothes. In 2005, when Consentino was commissioned to redesign a bathroom at the Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin, she created about 60 tiles that either depicted a head, middle, or bottom, then combined them in hundreds of different figures, in a manner reminiscent of the Surrealists’ exquisite corpses. That project led to the figural sculptures in her show at Dubhe Carreno, which also includes drawings. She made 18 molds in three categories–heads, middles, and bottoms–of animals, people, and flowers, then combined them in small or almost life-size ceramic sculptures. Flowerman is a guy in a suit with a sunflower head, Birdgirl is a bird’s torso with a girl’s head and feet, and in Harpy a woman’s head is joined to a bird’s torso and oversize claws.
