San Francisco Weekly
January 31, 2007
The vanitas tradition of 17th-century Dutch art features a bounty of skulls, watches, bubbles, rotting flowers, and dead fruit. The message is clear: Life is short, death is certain, and vanity is for suckers. In Vanitas Baby , artist Susannah Bettag takes that sour tradtions and gives it a playful update using her own unique symbols - plants, spores, porn, and cartoon characters. TakeGogololo , which features a close-up of a woman's smiling face. All around her are hundreds of spots, little blobs the size of freckles on her cheek, floating across the canvas as if the products of a sneeze or a bio-terror attack. But look close and you'll see something odd - they have eyeballs, and they're cute. This is Little Boo, a rudimentary creature with a large head shaped like a malformed egg. Bettag drops hundreds of the cartoon figures into her paintings, suspended in the ether like spacemen or tumbling across canvases, but they're just one of the compelling detailsin her rich, intricate work. Her backgrounds typically feature minimal sketches of pornography images, which serve as flat colorful fields onto which she piles her so-called vanitas symbols - everything from chili poppers and flowers to otherworldly plant life, disembodied heads, blood cells, and viruses. Everything is revealed in bright, bold colors that are far removed from the sober Dutch influence.
Little Boo, who appears regularly in Bettag's work, is the clear star, and the innocent beast gets a special tribute with Drowning Without You, an installation that features thousands of Boos rendered as tiny vinyl dolls, spilling from the ceiling in a 20-foot-long swarm. 'Vanitas Baby' continues through March 14 (an opening reception is on Feb. 1) at Frey Norris Gallery, 456 Geary (at Taylor), S.F. Admission is free; call 346-7812 or visit www.freynorris.com.
- Michael Leaverton
San Francisco Weekly, January 31, 2007