I think I’ve found a peerless analogue for the effervescent frenzy of Suzanne Husky’s handiwork (bear with me here). There’s an old Warner Bros. cartoon—I’m sure you know the one—in which a curious yet oblivious-to-the-world baby scoots away from the nuclear household, where a dog is inexplicably left in charge. The poor dog, panicked, tears after the baby, who by now is recklessly criss-crossing girders atop a high-rise construction project. As the baby’s automatic speed-crawl with kung-fu grip, approaches a plummet to giggling cartoon death, the dog heroically lashes the nearest girder or board to the budding building’s frame to extend the baby’s path. He zooms away to nab another extension, then another one. Another, until the only materials left to extend the skyward walkway are chairs, cars, appliances, beds, and other domestic items. Whose house was dog-robbed, we’ll never know. I sense this is the urgent relationship between Suzanne Husky’s head and hand (baby and dog, respectively), and so apropos for her show’s title, You Make Me Make You.

This is not to classify Husky’s head as the innocent in this give-and-take; the content reads like a season full of SNL fodder, alternately perverse and political. Her swirl of soft energy depicts—remember, just a taste—a goring unicorn, a lounging affluent woman, cows headed for slaughter, a samurai fight, a basketball one-on-one, a tree-squatting protestor, and a nut-busting sheep (or man dressed as one—hard to say). The overwhelming density of this biosphere-from-hell yields only for a crescent-shaped cut to allow spectators into her world. The space is mercifully small for the artist’s epic ambitions.

Most fascinating to me is observing that, inadvertently or not, Husky has come upon a system, a hierarchy of difficulty, that she consults as her technique is applied. An inverse relationship between a material’s application and a subject’s complexity allows for a breezy, steady pace of working. Hence, the most detail-intensive elements (backgrounds, posters, brand-specific items) are the most quickly crafted; they’re simply cut from magazines. Slightly less taxing are faces, which are inkjet-printed from photographs and sewn on—a bit Texas Chainsaw Massacre because of the harried, haphazard stitching. Then come hands and feet, hand-drawn, then stitched to the bodies. Last are the laboriously hand-sewn bodies, trees, and larger structures like houses, which dominate the scene with confident form and clashes of patterning. Husky’s work is all addition, and her profuse generosity follows the path of least resistance.

The term often given to her work, soft sculpture, might unfairly signal Claes Oldenburg, but scratch that. Nathalie Djurberg is an apt comparison, however: both create personal sculptural vignettes fronting descriptive diorama backdrops. Djurberg’s work is animation, though, and ultimately is tempered by the screen’s limitations and the video’s temporality. Husky’s work encourages bodies to loom over the knee-high platforms and investigate the environment. The denizens are strictly doll-sized (aside from the Belgian Blue-like cows) and, if it isn’t a friend or acquaintance of Husky’s, it’s a celebrity—happy to mingle with the common people, I might add. Contiguity here seems erratic, but it’s maintained by density.

I’m curious, therefore, to see how this work would operate when logically extended. More trees. More people. More epic. A taste of the epic lies in Husky’s Chinese factory depicted with frightening pink haz-mat suits and smiling faces of the grunts within. Next step: fill a Chinese factory full of Chinese factory dolls? I think the politics and scale can be amped up, but never in lieu of the love. I fear a total departure from friends and phantasmagoria would turn out only soft, sopping histrionics.

I’ll leave Suzanne Husky’s head to cogitate on that one; after all, her hand could use a rest. In the mean time, commission a textile portrait today—how voodoo!

--Andy Ritchie

(*Images, from top to bottom: Suzanne Husky, You Make Me Make You, May 22 - June 29, 2008; Triple Base Gallery, Factory Workers, 2008, recycled fabric and mixed media, dimensions variable, photo by Triple Base Gallery. Suzanne Husky, You Make Me Make You, May 22 - June 29, 2008; Triple Base Gallery, Save Oaks Activist, 2008, recycled fabric and mixed media, dimensions variable, photo by Triple Base Gallery. Suzanne Husky, You Make Me Make You, May 22 - June 29, 2008; Triple Base Gallery, Downer Cows in Feedlot, 2008, recycled fabric and mixed media, dimensions variable, photo by Triple Base Gallery. Suzanne Husky, You Make Me Make You, May 22 - June 29, 2008; Triple Base Gallery, Berkeley Secret Hot Tub, 2008, recycled fabric and mixed media, dimensions variable, photo by Triple Base Gallery. Suzanne Husky, You Make Me Make You, May 22 - June 29, 2008; Triple Base Gallery, installation view, photo by Triple Base Gallery.)