Rachel Livedalen Downsizes But Hits Hard in Red Rum Punch Gallery Show

Understanding the art of Fort Worth-based creator Rachel Livedalen requires an appreciation of the wildfire that is the adolescent teenage girl's need to speak in a world that usually requests they be pretty and silent.

Red Rum Punch is Livedalen's latest exhibition at the Erin Cluley Gallery. She's shown there before, but the first thing people will notice about the new offerings is their size.

For years, Livedalen has specialized in large canvases, most the size of movie posters or even bigger. The pieces in Red Rum Punch are intentionally shrunk down, often to canvases little larger than notebook paper. Livedalen says she did this to make the works more personal than they have ever been before.

"There’s much more of myself in these," she says in a phone interview. "All this fruit and statues and Cher are things I am obsessed with. I’ve almost treated them like small works on paper, which is something I’ve been working on for the past year or two."

Livedalen's pieces are remarkable, dancing between collage, painting, printing and multimedia. Often, the paintings look like something a high school freshman would do to their Trapper Keeper while in the throes of a creative mania, mixing pop culture images, abstract lines, bits of jewelry and stucker images into swirling cloud of interests.

One thing that stands out is Livedalen's fascination with fruits, especially red ripe ones like strawberries and watermelon slices ready to serve. These appear in deep crimsons, almost like they're bleeding, though she occasionally renders them in clinical black and white.

"I’ve been interested in fruit from a kitschy perspective," she says. "I’ve been collecting fruit beads, stickers, charms. There’s something about the duality of fruit as a culture symbol. It’s this cutesy, girlish item in some presentation, but it’s also a metaphor for female sexuality. In researching differences, ripeness and sexuality are certainly paired. There’s this fine line, a quasi-questionable line, between when fruit moves from tasty to sexy."

The unabashed femininity of Livedalen's work is what makes it compelling. She intentionally embraces the tropes of teenage presentation, almost as a dare to the viewer to see the nebulous haze of puberty as the vibrant storm of energy it is.

A self-professed sticker junkie, Livedalen collected a great many that you'd see randomly stuffed on lockers, textbooks and backpacks. Her favorites of these are yin-yang symbols, often an American young person's first iconography of a different spiritual perspective than the one they were raised with.

Livedale has a fascinating process where she hand-paints these sticker images with just a touch of shading to make them look like they are placed on the canvas. Using these repeating patterns, she matches other painting abstract lines. This gives depth and incongruencies to the final painting, starkly adding commercial religiosity to more traditional painting techniques in weird, garish lines.

"It's a sticker I have complete control over," she jokes.

Another common theme in Red Rum Punch is Greco-Roman statuary. Livedalen mostly uses statue faces of women in her starker, less colorful compositions. Their blank eyes and classical lines hint at idealism while also looking slightly out of place.

That's not an accident. Livedalen collects old art history textbooks and uses her training as a printer to achieve a distinct look. She prefers older books with lower-quality paper. When scanned and blown up in imaging software, there are bitmap dots over the image. This has the effect of making the statues look distant and removed from the rest of the painting, as if they are being viewed through a kinetoscope into the middle of the piece.

The weird thing about it is that it's only heads. No torsos or limbs.

"I started because I was drawn to these statues that were just heads," she says. "They had been disconnected from their bodies. That’s all that remains. It’s fascinating that you can have these statues that are missing heads or bodies. It’s human nature to be attracted to faces, and here they are broken and usually displayed on stakes. I'm looking at this historic object, and the presentation has an inherent violence."

There's no arguing that Red Rum Punch feels violent, though it's more of the sum of Livedalen's bizarre toolbox than an overt statement. As she says, the beauty of classical art is offset by the Cannibal Holocaust way those heads are removed from the human form. Her fruit drips with body horror, her kitschy pop culture references are slashes in the canvas, and even the abstract backgrounds feel like thunderclouds.

It's a remarkable collection of work that is both cute and a barely contained depiction of fury. Compressed down to these smaller canvases, they are teacup tempests.

Red Rum Punch is on view Feb. 15 through March 22 at Erin Cluley Gallery, 150 Manufacturing St. No. 210.