Next, the Red Riding Hood installation. On the left side of the floor is a girl-like paper sculpture, hooded in red. Her face has brown hair springing from around the edges, as if she is transforming into a wolf. Her eyes are glass and glittering, as realistic and haunting as a taxidermist’s collection. She looks frightened. An eerie booming howl comes from an invisible speaker in her chest. To the left of her, there’s a string of identically framed pictures of crudely drawn little girls in red hoods. The little girls trail off into a small black room behind the sculpture. In this room a large roughly drawn wolf runs choppily and repetitively on a screen. Next to and in front of the wolf, pictures of the girls in hoods flip by again and again on a television. It is if the poorly animated wolf is chasing the televised girls. The room is filled with an eerie howling.
Psychoanalysts have long thought that fairytales are important to a child’s development. Fairytales repetitively show the good, socially acceptable impulses mastering the bad, antisocial ones. They represent, by example, how to fit into society. They also make the promise that the scary dark side of the self, the wolf, can be expunged and overcome. In Kiki Smith’s tales, she exposes the myth behind the promise of fairytales, and shows the whole girl -- who is the wolf as well as Red Riding Hood.
More Kiki Links:
bloodline
Telling Tales at ICP
Older work.
A very informative interview with the artist.
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