"What if I could draw a bird that could change the world?"
Kathleen Henderson poses the question in an urgent, childlike scrawl. "In a good way, I mean. In a good way." The words fan out across the body of a clumsy, angry, turkey-like creature drawn in dense black and blue. "I know this is not that bird," the text concludes. "I know that."
If it's audacious to imagine art having world-changing power, it's also essential to act as though it does. Art wields whatever power we assign it. Henderson's recent drawings and sculptures at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery make a devastatingly strong case to assign it more. And then more.
Based in Northern California, Henderson had her first L.A. show at Felsen last spring, and it delivered a resounding punch. The current exhibition feels continuous with the first -- equally tough, discomfiting, creepy and compelling. With 58 works, the show is large in numbers and huge in terms of its emotional push-pull.
Henderson draws in black oil stick on stark white sheets of paper, occasionally augmenting an image with touches of red, blue, sepia or putty, a smudge or a fingerprint. There is no fussiness, no shading, no real background or foreground. She draws with rawness and insistence, channeling Goya on up through Golub. Each drawing feels like a brusque declaration: This situation/condition exists; consider it.
Torture, shooting, dancing and praying take place on these pages, over and over. Desperation and hostility seem to dominate the motivations of the characters within. A state of nakedness prevails -- not necessarily the unclothed kind, though some figures are nude and a few sexually aroused. The nakedness has more to do with blunt honesty, an unapologetic openness about malignant aspects of human behavior -- for instance, the way we find violence entertaining.
One figure pokes himself in the eye with a stick "just for fun," according to Henderson's caption-like description on the page. The guy next to him points and smiles. In another drawing, a man hangs upside down from a crude scaffold. One of his captors binds the man's body with tape.
Henderson's characters reveal themselves in spite of wearing hoods or masks, or perhaps because of such selective concealment. One of the officers chasing down a pudgy suspect sports a mask with a clown-like nose and exaggerated, cantaloupe-slice smile. His ridiculous expression turns the matter of law and order into a game, at least for the pursuer.
