Jeffrey Vallance, La Chapelle de Poulet

Jeffrey Vallanc, La Chapelle de Poulet at Edward Cella Art & Architecture. Photo D.K. Sole

by D.K. Sole

Jeffrey Vallance once imagined a giant hen manifesting in the sky above Las Vegas. That’s what we were told as we stood there in Edward Cella Art & Architecture, looking around at shelves of the artist’s handmade mementoes: crucifixes, wooden caskets, reliqueries, cabinets, hooks, toy barns, all bearing a freight of chickens. Some of the chickens were plastic, some looked like tin or brass, some were rubber, some were wood; one was a fabric codpiece with a beak, a joke cock. They were nailed in place, they were glued, they were heaped loosely in drawers. There were no records of anything appearing in the Las Vegas sky, but the artist lived in the city during the mid-1990s and references to it appear in some of the Chapelle Poulet drawings. The exhibition is a 40th anniversary retrospective of Blinky, the Friendly Hen, a project that began in 1978 when Vallance bought a frozen chicken at a supermarket and gave it a deluxe interment at a Los Angeles pet cemetery. Four decades of memorial objects followed, some incorporating fragments of the original Blinky or relics from her burial. Like the rest of his oeuvre, the project runs on ideas that could have formed the nucleus of a serious study – call it The Slaughterhouse Chicken as Neglected Martyr: Symbol and Praxis – while dodging the formal structures that would make the ideas respectable. Wandering on a quest for ludic democracy, it puts nativity scenes next to drawings of Blinky with her wattles drooping like hairy human balls. Vallance’s vision of chickens as trans-cultural sacrifices leads him into cultural appropriation territory (is that a Blinky Buddha?) but his ideas about the Universal Hen are worked out unevenly, with crucifixes and other Euro-referential imagery outnumbering everything else. On the other hand he’s promoting self-centric haphazardness as a cultivatable virtue, so I don’t know if this is much of a criticism.

Jeffrey Vallance, La Chapelle de Poulet
Edward Cella Art & Architecture, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90034 
Nov 2, 2019 – Jan 4, 2020

Australian artist D.K. Sole lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is in charge of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.

Posted by Wendy Kveck December 27, 2019.