photos by Etienne Frossard (2018)
Flamingo (2018) - video
Everyone thinks that they can write a children’s book. Most adults are awful predictors of children’s taste. Adults often err in thinking of children’s inner lives as simpler, more innocent versions of their own. But look back at the stories and characters that entertained you as a child and you may find some strange, unsettling stuff.
Did the things that compelled us as children compel us in spite of being bizarre or creepy or because they were? And did the creators think kids wouldn’t catch the drift of their darker undercurrents, or very much know that they would?
Andrew Brehm’s show Flamingo is full of this tension.
The shell of a smiling manatee appears to rise buoyantly out of the floor with rounded, lipped orifices to spare, a mouth like a camel or a camel toe, and a nose and a grin like a drunk. The manatee, like all the sculptures in the show, appears to be built for interaction. A small enough kid could fit all the way underneath the manatee shell and could poke all kinds of things out of its holes: arms, legs, balloons, noisemakers, oars, who knows! Adults, not able to fit underneath, would have to settle for poking things into the holes.
Elsewhere, one can imagine the tall black creature getting squeezed like a bagpipe or rocking across the floor, clicking along on its plunger handle legs, a closed form except for a little bulbous butthole, practically begging for a finger. A round shell hung up by a string, looks like it has been plucked from a beach or from the back of some fantastical animal, ready to be a vessel, or a hat, or a belly. The fact that the show is in a tiny, empty Chinatown apartment, through many locked doors, a courtyard, and an illegally narrow hallway, makes it also seem possible that rather than waiting for you to animate them, these objects have a life of their own and that by entering you’ve caused them to freeze.
These objects feel like the Trojan horses of children’s entertainment, round and cheery but full of suggestive holes. The show would certainly be a hit with kids but it has the tenor of a drunkenly improvised story told to a child up past their bedtime at party. A story that the child knows is actually for the adults but misimagines how.
-Hannah Walsh (2020)