Debbie Korbel is Living the Dream by Genie Davis
Debbie Korbel‘s mystical, marvelous solo exhibition Living the Dream, now at Riverside College Quad Gallery in Riverside, is an exciting, enchanting sculptural show filled with wit, poetry, and a profound sense of grace.
Entering Korbel’s world is like taking a walk through both the artist’s dreams and your own. Horses made of wire and found metal parts are ready to gallop across a wild prairie; Frankenstein and Jesus are merged into one suffering and ecstatic image; flowers burst from an elegiac “Indian Summer,” and an electric blue deer conjures up a vision of beauty and delight.
The artist’s use of unusual materials is exciting and inventive, but it is her sense of motion, through both joy and pain, that is the most unique.
Living the Dream is an apt title for an exhibition that is both dream-like and packed with abundant life. Each work in its own way conveys a sense of yearning, a longing for the dream to continue or shift, for reality to bend. And if anyone could actually bend it, that would be Korbel, whose gift for creation is magically, marvelously slightly off kilter.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition weaves a complex spell of alternative reality, one both intimately recognizable and strangely alien. Individually, each piece has a powerful emotional resonance, a kind of ache to be set free, find happiness, achieve a transformation that might provide both, or neither.
“Night Dreaming” is a glorious image, a deer that is mutant indigo, with patterns of black and beige a part of his painted coat. With purple ears and tree branch antlers from which lustrous pink flowers spring, this lovely young deer is the bringer of spring and hope.
Positioned beside him in the gallery are white-painted trees abloom in their own right with vibrant nesting bluebirds, in a delicate work simply titled “Birds in Trees.”
From this light, joyous focal point along the center wall of the gallery, weightier titles, topics, and materials spread out. Positioned in the middle of the gallery, “The Call” is exuberant, wild, and brilliantly free. Wire tail flung outward like a flag, head raised, back arched, this is the call to run, to feel the wind, to carry it home.
Next to this beauty stands “Small Talk,” head bowed as if grazing, his perfect dangling tail created from found electrical conduits. Both these fine beasts are sinew and muscle made from a steampunk reality of metal and wire that, once conjoined, becomes more alive than flesh and bone. They stand on bases that are intrinsically created by Korbel to be of one piece with the sculptures themselves, not merely a base but the place on which these mythical creatures could stand. “Small Talk” is poised on what could be the wooden floor of a barn; “The Call” is balanced on what could be part of a road or rail ties.
There is a rich nuance to these horses, each intricate component, whether a factory discard, automotive part, mesh, or metal wire all come together in a kinetic rush to form a coherent, tough, yet delicate whole. “Small Talk” also embodies a poem written by the artist, “Quasimodo Love,” which reads in part “I don’t know how to be more.” And which of us do? And, which of us don’t make ourselves smaller in our own self-talk, sure that love will leave us if we cannot perfect our flaws.
Another equine, “Wired,” proudly poses on a pedestal wearing a crown shaped from a part of a fan, his muscular torso lined with bright yellow wire, a sunshine brightness so galvanizing his title can only speak to it. Encased in a mesh-fleshed body, this young stallion has pool balls as a part of his genitalia.
A different sort of ballsy humor is embodied by “Happiness is a Warm Gun” in which a bright blue man/rabbit throws back his head, quite pleased with himself and his scatologically placed firearm, his title is transcribed on his thigh. While recognizably human, his long rabbit ears and rabbit-hoof feet make his tough-guy posturing as comical as it is deadly.
A full rabbit is the subject of “Who’s Lucky Now, Motherf*@ker?!” Here, positioned on a square open box that could be a rabbit hutch, this is definitely “somebunny” as he dangles a human leg on a key ring, just as once upon a time we might have carried an actual small rabbit’s foot for “good luck.” His slightly psychedelic purple, green, and white patterning and cute wire tail belies an expressive face that’s seen some things. And acted on others.
Turning more seriously toward the human and inhuman condition, “Forsaken” gives us a Christ-like Frankenstein, his halo constructed of amber glass and a part of a fan, his face drawn back in a rictus of both suffering and ecstasy. With a chain dangling against one cheek, this man has suffered as all humans suffer, and perhaps for us as well.
There is a quiet transcendence in the suffering of “Metamorphosis,” as a human man, his face deep in thought, riven with both a cocky boldness and regret, merges into a ragged butterfly. One wing is imprinted with poetry written by Korbel, “I see your lips moving but I can’t hear a sound/I am lost in the cathedral of your eyes.” Is this the kind of terrible, ecstatic morphing of love, or an ache that hopes to achieve it?
“Wild is My Heart” is the head of an elegant horse, partially turned, with amber glass sparkling near his eyes and a tangled aluminum wire mane. His nostrils flare, his elegant, fiery spirit awaits a freedom he cannot yet achieve.
Other works are just as lovely and inchoate with hope and loss: “The Kiss” gives us conjoined sisters, as restricted as they are, they express a deep tenderness; “Dreaming” gives us a beautiful man growing his ragged angel’s wings; “Flirt” is a teasing woman with an impossible headdress.
Above, “Michael,” is another tender, insightful work.
Regardless of title, whether human, deer, horse, rabbit, or a mythical mix, each of these wonderful, wondrous sculptures glows with a fierce lifeforce that the artist herself embodies. Never losing their sense of humor or their hope for a better world, the dream they live, along with that of their creator, is simply marvelous.
Living the Dream runs through April 6th; Riverside College Quad Gallery is located at 4800 Magnolia Ave. in Riverside.
- Genie Davis; photographs by LA Art Documents