Girl Art

Barbies and breakups take over Lawndale, with mixed results

Comments (0) By Kelly Klaasmeyer Thursday, Sep 21 2006

...continued from page 1

If you're going to make art about your personal life, you have to find a way to make it resonate with people besides yourself. Men and women of every sexual orientation have angry breakup letters stuck in the back of a drawer or buried deep in a hard drive, but thank goodness few of us inflict them on the public. Scanning Huete's badly written and endless harangues, self-absorbed whining and relationship dissection makes you really feel sorry for her ex, no matter what she did. Like her, no doubt, we wish Huete would just shut up.

As a part of her project, Huete "quit her day job" to wash the walls and then rewrite the text each day the gallery is open. I was at the show a week after it opened and it looked like that ambitious plan was on the wane. Still, the accumulation of ghost text is making the walls more visually interesting and the artist's narcissism less legible. If she applied the same process to a better chosen subject, things might be more successful. Huete is young and just out of school; thank goodness she has plenty of time to learn from her mistakes.