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Originally published: Kansas City Star
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There is nothing girly about "Fluff," a show at MoMO Studios featuring paintings and drawings by Kansas City artist Lad. Its title bears a sarcastic relationship to the show's contents -- 11 dark paintings featuring gritty images of war tanks, missiles, and males with erections on painterly abstracted backgrounds and four simple line drawings. It feels like a gut retort to the Iraq war, but in a phone interview the 1994 Kansas City Art Institute graduate explained that the works were completed before the invasion. The more successful paintings use war images as signifiers of male aggression and power. In some, the addition of childlike drawings of tanks serve as a reminder of the weapon-themed toys kids encounter at an early age. Some of Lad's pure abstractions feel empty. They fail to invest in her critique of war, but more importantly they miss out on the artist's strong knack for the drawn line. The show's four small drawings highlight this ability. Their slack flowing lines divest their male subjects of aggressiveness, rendering them humanized, peaceful beings. |
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