In her third solo show at Postmasters gallery, polish artist Katarzyna Kozyra exhibits a video and suite of production stills representing the final installment of In Art Dreams Come True, a series of quasi-theatrical productions, video installations, and interactive performances initiated by the artist in 2003. Kozyra’s summertale is a grotesque and enigmatic loose rendition of the classic fairy tale, Snow White, including a quintet of female midget-dwarfs, a drag queen, and an operatic dandy known as the Maestro. The twenty-minute video opens with the dwarfs in a lush garden outside their rural cottage, attending to the various plants and shrubs. Shortly, three figures hatch from oversized mushrooms – an innocent Snow White type played by the artist, the drag queen, and the opera singer. All are treated well by the dwarfs who take them into their home, but quickly turn against their guests when they discover that one of the she’s is really a he. As a result, the dwarfs knock out their guests and chop up their bodies with an axe, as the Snow White figure watches bound and gagged.

With a dozen or so top international artists whose projects turn video art into a cinematic experience, Kozyra has to step up her game or continue to exist in a negative space somewhere between the discourse and praxis of fine art and film studies. In a world familiar with the transgressive films of John Waters and the provocative psychosexual art of Paul McCarthy, summertale becomes not raunchy enough to compete with the former and not shocking enough to rival the latter, though this is not to say that good art needs to be shocking or raunchy. But what it must be, is original.

Having said that, what I like most in this exhibit are the production stills hanging in the back gallery at Postmasters. Not all the scenes depicted in the photographs are directly from the video, but rather staged specifically for the still camera. Here, one can enjoy the ambiguity of the narrative and the bizarre childlike playfulness of the performative act, without having to suffer through the pitfalls of video art that is neither a successful short film nor a successful work of fine art. 

Images: Production stills from summertale (2008).  Courtesy Postemasters.