Child’s Play
William Howell did the unthinkable. He took his friend’s mom’s old, faded Tigger doll and tore its head off. Not only that, he sewed one leg from each of ten collectible teddy bears into the hole that his decapitation had left.
This creation is one of several altered plush toys Howell displays only through Saturday at the Cube @ Beco in the Crossroads. “I had this collection of old, battered-up stuffed animals,” Howell explains. “I had stopped painting for a year, but I still wanted to make.” The first time he mutated a stuffed animal, he did it for a friend who wanted to dress up his dog for Halloween. He sliced off the top of a yellow bunny’s head right above the eyes; once removed, the head made a great costume for a live dog. Later, Howell ended up sewing the rest of the rabbit together with a Pegasus doll that had been disturbingly cut in half.
One of his more abstract creations, “Soft Blue Furry,” is just a teddy bear’s leg with half an abdomen and a patch of blindingly bright blue fur from a carnival bunny sewn on for good measure. Howell once put “Soft Blue Furry” in front of a baby — who loved it. “Babies don’t care. When adults see this, they freak out,” he says. “But I think my target audience would enjoy the abstract imagery. Hopefully. I don’t know; maybe I’m wrong about kids.”
Probably not. A mature viewer might read commentary into the gesture of ripping apart stuffed animals and deforming them. It might be seen as therapy, a cry against violence, an attempt to question the innocence of children or a rebellion against stupid art such as the March of the Teddy Bears. But Howell isn’t concerned with adult themes. He’s thinking of the children.
He made two bunny masks based on Watership Down, appropriately named “Big Wig” and “Fiver.” “Those were my two favorite characters in the book,” he says. The man who bought the Fiver mask came to the Cube show’s opening in early June and tried it on to amuse his daughter. Howell says the girl began giggling uncontrollably. “That’s so ideal,” he says. “That’s exactly what I’d want it to be used for.”
A few of Howell’s paintings also hang on the gallery’s back wall. They’re puzzles, with patterns involving argyle and stripes. “What I was working with was how to put this puzzle together and not make it completely horrid, because I know these things don’t always sync up or fit with the audience’s idea of what colors look good together,” he says. Though gold and orange probably won’t be Martha Stewart’s colors of the season any time soon, it’s even less likely that Howell’s sewn constructions will show up in the mainstream market.
Especially the one he officially titled “Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing” but more often calls Stash Bear. “I used to keep my weed in there,” Howell says. “Not that I’d encourage any young readers to do drugs, but things happen.”
