• Don’t understand this exhibit? Stick with it.

Mona Superhero makes images with Pop, jazz and erotic sources, but look closely; it’s all duct tape.
04/14/03
D.K. ROW

It’s not your usual invitation to see fine art: Hey, Hon, let’s hit that funky little bar in Southeast Portland for a look at some of those duct tape works.

But don’t dismiss the cutting-edge pieces in Portland artist Mona Superhero’s show at the Aalto Lounge this month. Superhero’s images of slinky roller-girls, a silhouette of Miles Davis, voodoo icons with purple vests and sexy Pachinko pinball machine goddesses (ka-ching!) are an eyeful of vivid living color.

The two-dimensional images echo such diverse elements as East Indian movie posters, the sickle-and-hammer designs found in Soviet propaganda and prints of famous album covers. In one work, a Masai warrior hovering above a silhouette of Davis looks eerily like a twisted, more sinister version of the trumpeter’s cover for Bitches Brew.

Superhero finds mind-bending inspiration for her underground artwork, she says, in such comic books as Love and Rockets and such jazz music as Davis’ Kind of Blue.

But her nutty universe of diverse cultural influences isn’t remarkable solely for the artist’s playful fusion of Pop art, jazz, rock music, erotica and the subterranean milieu of smoky bars and clubs. It’s what the stuff is made of: Look closely and you’ll recognize the grainy, calloused tactility of MacGyver’s indispensable tool: duct tape.

There’s no oil, metal, clay or cameras used in Superhero’s art. Her characters come to life through the rigor of blade and balky tape, a struggle of good-versus-evil proportions: Armed with her X-acto knife, Superhero painstakingly slices out strips and bits of variously colored duct tape onto melamine panels to make amazingly complex relief images and designs.

Rollergirls I, for instance, depicts two roller-skating phenoms joined at the hip and head, surrounded around by a mini-menagerie of kittens and snakes. It’s one big family album photo, but of a family like few others.

Remember How You Found Me captures a love fantasia that could have been taken from an Edgar Allan Poe story: two lovers chained at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by several palm like plants. The work, Superhero says, was inspired by a similarly themed song by the rock band Elysian Fields.

With their bright colors and compositional intricacy, Superhero’s works are not a casual throw-off for a draftsman. Making subtle curves and lines as well as tight patterns, details and filigrees with blade and thick clingy tape is a patience-testing task akin to composing a missive by cutting and pasting individual letters from different magazines. It’s a method of madness — or maybe a method toward it.

I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder that allows me to cut tape . . . , jokes the 31-year-old Texas native, who says she has worked in law firms, restaurants and as a stripper before making art.

But the images are not the only illusions being spun here. There is also the artist: Mona Superhero is the stage name the artist used as a cult figure in Portland’s cabaret-performance world during the ’90s.

After traveling the country for a few years, Superhero returned recently. She kept her stage name but changed her act. This body of picky-as-pointillism tape work is Superhero’s first fine art exploration and marks a transition from subterranean art star to master of the tape-and-cut form.

With their unorthodox processes and idiosyncratic themes, Superhero’s works are a refreshing release from the belief that art must carry the weight and burden of deep meaning. Put down that encyclopedia and pick up that graphic novel! they cry. Superhero has never studied art or art history. And though the commercial instincts of Andy Warhol and the buzz-saw color palette and symbolism of Peter Max are apparent in these works, the artist deflects any hint that she’s trying for historical or cultural allusions.

I’ve always had a crush on Wolverine — he’s dreamy, the artist says of the dashing, blade-fingered hero from the X-Men comics.

Ultimately, beyond showing us what she likes to read, listen to and watch, what are these works about? What do these far-out images — which include a woman in sunglasses raising her arms to the heavens, crowned by the dizzying lights of a Pachinko game — say about the artist?

I’m not terribly comfortable . . . a lot of them are reflecting my own paranoia — just being scared of everything . . . being afraid of human interaction.

D.K. Row - dkrow@news.oregonian.com