Kristi Malakoff
"Kristi Malakoff" by Gary Pearson, Spring 2007, p. 103
Beauty is a contentious topic in art these days. The myriad associated meanings and usages of the word have a loaded history in both vernacular speech and aesthetics. It’s a concept without much currency in contemporary art discourse, but something must have changed, because beauty in subject, style and content has been making waves of late.
Among those advancing the envelope here in Canada is Kristi Malakoff, a young artist out of Vancouver who has just completed a string of shows in Canada and a residency in Reykjavik, and last winter showed her work at the Museo Regional de Querétaro in Mexico. In The Glade, an installation she presented in Kelowna last summer, Malakoff reprised the plot line of a Victorian fairy tale called Tinykin’s Transformations to create a sculptural theatre whose cast of characters included a menagerie of trees and shrubs, animals, birds and animal-human hybrids. The latter subjects are the result of acts of transformation, the power of which has been bestowed upon a boy by the lovestruck fairy queen Titania, who blissfully floats aloft, unaware that off to the dark side of this idyllic narrative stands an archer poised to let an arrow fly from his deadly bow.
The exhibition was fabricated like a false-front movie set, with each of the flat sculptural forms cut out of medium-density fibreboard and embellished with some 23,000 cut-out paper flowers. In a contemporary twist on narrative and aesthetic elements of the Gothic, Malakoff has juxtaposed active rigidity and ornament, transformations from animal to human to vegetal, love and sorrow, life and death, sensation and idea. In digesting this heartfelt and engaging installation one might reflect on John Ruskin’s words about architecture in The Nature of Gothic, where he writes that in its “appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the statement may appear, a part of its humility.”
Part of the visual appeal of Malakoff ’s work rests in the sumptuousness of its craftsmanship and its luxurious presentation, yet in a non-ironic turn, it’s the work’s appeal to the imagination that makes the most lasting impression. It is as if something once lost has been regained.
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