Past Tense

Thrift stores and attics aren’t the only places to find antique kitsch anymore. Happy housewives and other aged cultural icons have been popping up in contemporary art for quite some time now — it’s easy for disenchanted 21st-century audiences to get a quick laugh out of the hunky-dory images of yesteryear. By this point, however — especially as ad agencies jump back on their old bandwagons — such recycled imagery frequently fails to evoke nostalgia or irony and instead just creates a sense of ennui.

Live Wires and Pacifiers: Amusements, Both Educational and Cautionary at the Green Door Gallery, features the work of two artists who draw inspiration from advertising and pop images of the past. Kansas Citian Lori Raye Erickson incorporates 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s magazine clippings into twenty candy-colored, lavishly textured paintings and collages. Boston artist Jen Fridy bases her thirteen morbidly themed and carefully fabricated paintings on illustrations and designs from the 1920s and ’30s.

Although Erickson has a background in graphic design, that’s not why she’s interested in vintage advertisements. “I don’t know why exactly I’m attracted to the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s images,” she admits. But she views them as humorous and innocent and often plays with those concepts. In “Sharing Is Caring,” Erickson recreates an old illustration in which an apron-wearing mother washes dishes with her daughter and son. Erickson twists the scene, replacing regular plates and utensils with large butcher knives. Beyond the crop of the illustration, though, is a beautiful, pink-and-charcoal-colored background, cracked and peeling. The flatly painted kitchen scene is a stark contrast to the rough-and-tumble texture of the treated-wood background.

“I find things — old things,” Erickson says. “[I have] lots of piles. Not just one — several. Hundreds, probably thousands.” They’re piles of stuff she’s discovered on the street or in antique stores as well as personal objects, like the teeth she used in “Brush Correctly” and “Toof.” For both of these pieces, Erickson uses a cheap, canvas-board background and paints a brightly smiling child, then pastes on vintage ads for dental-care products along with a human tooth. Erickson’s nephew lost the baby tooth; the molar with the silver dental work came from her own mouth.

The weirdest item in Erickson’s collection sounds like a prop from the movie Frankenweenie. One of Erickson’s friends asked her veterinarian to save her dog’s eyeball after a surgery; she then gave it to Erickson in a glass jar. Erickson isn’t sure how she’ll use the eyeball. She begins creating artwork with a loose idea of the aesthetic outcome, but much of her process involves experimentation.

“Bufferin Bottle filled with Ball Bearings in Black Box” incorporates an array of “B” items from Erickson’s junk piles: a picture of a Volkswagen Beetle, wrapping paper decorated with Bugs Bunny, a photograph of a girl wearing a beehive hairdo and baring her boobies for all to see. In “Goosey, Goosey, Gander,” Erickson conveys something more personal. Here, she’s affixed yellowed sheet music — a gift from a cherished older friend — to a wooden board riddled with tiny metal rivets and painted with brisk swipes of pink and blue; a pattern of yellow and white spray-painted polka dots covers the bottom. Illustrating the nursery-rhyme lyrics are a sketchy line drawing of a songbird on its perch and a black-and-white rendition of a stairway. A mechanical device behind the board chimes a tune when viewers press a button.

These two pieces employ vintage imagery in a more introspective and creative manner than much of Erickson’s other work in Live Wires and Pacifiers, moving beyond the cheap laugh of overly familiar ’40s, ’50s and ’60s icons.

Jen Fridy says she enjoys “the surreality” of old advertising, especially when it’s for products no longer on the market. “These odd things were made to fill a niche and eventually faded out of existence,” Fridy says.

What Fridy calls “cool old stuff” includes Art Nouveau posters, wartime propaganda, underground comics, old children’s books and board games. But unlike Erickson’s pleasing pop images, Fridy’s paintings are dark and morbid. “I’ve got a bit of an unhealthy obsession with things that scare me,” Fridy explains. “Shipwrecks, curses, spontaneous combustion, awful things jumping out of dark places … I’ve noticed lately that seems to come though in a lot of the art.”

Her “Public Service Announcement” warns viewers in scripty, black-and-yellow hand lettering that “bad luck can take many forms” and offers ominous but helpful advice: “don’t be caught unawares.” Using watercolorlike glazes, Fridy depicts a young girl in a yellow dress and kneesocks who has come across a black cat. Below that appears an image out of traveling carnival posters — a malicious face sporting a huge, elongated smirk. Inside its rubbery lips appear four unlucky vignettes: the hand of a drowning victim futilely grasping above the water, orange flames leaping from a burning building, a heart pierced by arrows, and a canary lying dead behind the brass bars of its cage. (It’s possible that a black cat could cross viewers’ paths while they’re contemplating Fridy’s artwork; four such creatures live at the Green Door Gallery.)

Some of Fridy’s paintings seem like illustrations from a scary story. “What sort of trickery is this?” might as well be a cross between an Edward Gorey picture book, Ally McBeal and The Matrix. It depicts a young man and woman in a parlor, the woman grasping the man’s fingers with one hand and pulling at a strand of beads around her neck with the other. As she gazes down at the face of the man below her, the woman floats above a waist-high sea of blood. Her shirt is unbuttoned, and a fountain of blood pours from her chest. (This fountain would make an interesting addition to the Plaza.)

Fridy surrounds her artwork with vintage frames, stained or scratched to match each particular piece. And her superb compositional skills are undoubtedly a result of illustration training at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fridy’s crisp, black line work and aged-looking, jewel-toned palette add to the arresting quality of “What sort of trickery is this?” Also striking is Fridy’s attention to details, such as black swirls and waves in the ruby-red blood and the navy- and baby-blue wrinkles in the man’s suit.

Although it’s bloody, it’s not gross, and the characters who inhabit it seem remarkably calm.

“The more narrative pieces tend to come to me like scenes from a book no one’s written yet,” Fridy says. “I think in vignettes and scenes mostly, like memory. I don’t link events chronologically very well, because the possibilities are endless. I can’t figure out what comes next.”

“It’s weird,” observes Green Door Gallery cofounder Hector Casanova. “Her people never seem to be in pain, per se. They always have this intent, sort of cynical look in their eyes.”

This lends Fridy’s characters an everyman quality — with a little bit of imagination, viewers can see themselves in these horrible predicaments. Fridy certainly does. “I have an unfortunate tendency to spend a fair amount of my time mulling over the myriad of unpleasant things that can happen to ruin someone’s day. Namely mine.”

The result isn’t exactly pleasant and nostalgic, but it’s a lot more evocative than images we’ve seen again and again for the last half-century.