Interiors Magazine
Spring 2005
p. 80

Fusion Culture

by Tor Lukasic-Foss

Steve Mazza

You might not immediately realize it, but the rabbit, that cute, leaf-chomping favourite of the woods, enjoys a remarkably complex and psychologically charged other life as a cultural symbol. Ranging from the tempting white rabbit in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 work Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the manic, surreal, and ever-present Bugs Bunny, from Jimmy Stewart’s benign hallucination Harvey (from the 1950 film of the same name) to its counterpart, the macabre and demanding Frank from the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko, rabbits have asserted themselves as arbiters between the planes of reality and fantasy, order and chaos, normalcy and utter madness.

In the visual arts, a few notable rabbits are worth mentioning. Jeff Koon’s 1986 “Rabbit”, for example, a stainless steel replica of a novelty balloon animal, typified the 80’s zeal for fusions of high and low culture, irony and reverence. Canadian John Scott’s iconic 1992 “Mars Bunny” also comes to mind, an eerie amalgam of rabbit, alien, and Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, cast as a pre-apocalyptic messiah.  In both cases, the innocence of the animal contradicts more ominous absurdities just under the surface.

Steve Mazza is a ceramic sculptor. Although the range of subject matter he depicts is remarkably wide, the rabbit is his pre-eminent recurring symbol. And it is clear that Mazza has no interest in the rabbit as a creature of nature, but rather as an ambassador of the human dream world, loaded to the teeth with all of the literary and cultural complexities cited above.

Mazza is currently working towards his very first solo exhibition this summer at the Transit Gallery on Locke Street. The focal point is intended to be a series of small standing figures, roughly 20” high, all depictions of the same breed of humanoid rabbit, equipped with two floppy rabbit ears, a single human ear, Caucasoid skin, and a blank, yearning melancholy in its eyes. Each figure is engaged in a banal, and common place activity, and each is dressed in highly neutral business-casual attire.

“I was really interested in the contradiction of imaginary creatures going through the ritual of getting ready for a nine-to-five job, doing all these actions that you would never define your day by: brushing teeth, watching television, going to the bathroom, or putting on or taking off clothes. Maybe they speak something about how the dream world falls jeopardy when your waking life becomes monotonous, although I am not sure that there’s a single meaning I want to put on them. I did recently invent a word, ‘hypofantasy,’ meaning a kind of low state of fantasy, or a banal fantasy. I think what I’m trying to do is create a finished universe to describe this word.”

Like all of his work, these are sculptures that occupy a narrative space; he has even textured the surface of the figures with a cross-hatching technique, which lends to an illusion of them having just popped out from the illustrations of some existential children’s book.  They are also astonishingly well-rendered, boasting a technical precision more often seen in very traditional, very conservative figurative sculpture.  What pushes them away from the cliché of ceramics into their own category is their combination of the psychedelic poppy-ness of Robert Crumb or the Heinz Edelmann’s design work for the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine with the controlled caricature of Sir John Tenniel’s original Alice in Wonderland ink drawings.  The resulting work bubbles with a strange humility, as if the humour and the bright colours are intentionally meant to distract the viewer from the tightness of their design and the earthiness of their clay constitution.

Although Mazza studied Art and Art History at the Erindale campus of University of Toronto, it took him several years after graduation to define and commit to an arts practice.  He spent over two years in the Florida area, dabbling in the world of competitive sailing, living on a boat, and bartending to make ends meet.  When he returned to Hamilton in 2000, he narrowly escaped a career in clothing retail, before he decided to commit more fully to his craft.  It was a painful decision for Mazza to take the little money he had saved and set out on a life in art.  Fortunately, over the last four years, he has established himself as a fairly visible member of Hamilton’s contemporary arts scene, as a co-founder of trendy gag the gallery on John North (which ran for just over a year between 2002 and 2003), as well as contributor to several group exhibitions, most recently the Cotton Centre for the Arts on Sherman North, where Mazza maintains a studio.  He is able to keep going through private commissions and a variety of part-time jobs.

It is possible to see these rabbits serving an autobiographical purpose; they embody some of the tensions an artist faces trying to straddle both the creative and the practical world at the same times.  There is a constant danger of either floating away into complete fantasy, of being chained down by the practicalities of daily survival.  To endure, one has to remain in a state of “hypofantasy”.

“The act of making them has lots of ironies, I guess.  But also there is a notion of penance, penance for having abandoned the sphere of nine-to-five work.  I guess making rabbits over and over again appeals to me because it represents a sort of day in, day out working routine that I can commit to.  And clay is good for me because it is a certainty; I know how to work it and know that regardless of how I feel or what kind of state I am in when I get into the studio, I will be touching clay.  I can keep making these rabbit figures over and over again, and it never really becomes automatic or boring.  And now when I wear a tie, it’s because I’ve made all these rabbits, and they’re all wearing ties.  Somehow that makes sense to me.”