Anchorage Daily News

REAL-LIFE MAKE-BELIEVE, art by Lisa and Stephen Gray, will be on display until Nov. 18 at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, 121 W. Seventh Ave. (343-4326, www.anchoragemuseum.org)

When Billy meets the farm girl in Lisa Gray's digital collage "Billy on a Stick," mischief turns macabre. The ghoulish, girlish figure looks guileless in expression but about as innocent as a kid with a hammer and a busted piggybank in pose. Dolled up and standing in a sunlit field of grass, she holds little Billy's head on a pike.

So it goes in the hyper-real, hyper-imagined world of digitally altered collages by Stephen and Lisa Gray in "Real-Life Make-Believe," their show in the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. Here, an aura of comic-book humor and comic-book horror dwells in the saturated depth of social commentary.

"Some of the images are quite shocking, but you find yourself laughing at them," said David Nicholls, the museum's curator of exhibitions. "The energy between that first initial shock and then the contemplation of what's actually being said is amazing."

So much so that the museum's acquisition committee spent a good deal of time talking about the work before buying three pieces, Nicholls said.

"I think that's why this show is successful. People will come and talk about it because it is, to some extent, quite controversial."

The Grays don't just explore the taboo, they plunge right into it. Lisa's "Bo Peep" twists a quirky nursery rhyme about a shepherdess's devotion into a story of violation, while Steven's "Making Bad Relationships Good and Good Relationships Better" warps a team-building motto into the id's preferred method for "getting along."

Heads roll and flesh deforms in these illuminations on desire and violence, innocence and malevolence, pop culture and experience, immortality and imminent death, what you believe and what you know.

"The show challenges your ideas and preconceptions about the past, about roles and things you probably thought were quite safe and secure, like cartoon figures and stories like Little Bo Peep," Nicholls said.

DAMAGE, DOOM AND BELLY LAUGHS

Lisa Gray's sexualized, objectified girls appear damaged, always, just as Stephen's Billy character perpetrates mischief that could just as easily backfire in his post-apocalyptic universe.

"Part of our need to show damage is the realness of it, the idea of maintaining a certain authenticity and realness by not being too pure and too stylistically perfect," Stephen said. "Someone once said, 'The poetry is in the flaws,' and I think there's a lot of truth in that."

Damage unearths the truth, Lisa said, as when she poses iconic figures including Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe as deformed and woeful rather than mythically flawless. Or when she explores the cultural complicity in the consequences of emphasizing appearance and sexuality in girls.

Both Grays embrace essential artistic beliefs, including the need to reveal flaws, the drive to tap into human emotion, the desire to provoke viewers to see things a different way. Indeed, they talk about what art means to them all the time since they share a house, work in the same media, rely on the same digital process, cope with the same life struggles and pose similar questions about the world.

But Lisa and Stephen work with quite different technical and aesthetic sensibilities, as demonstrated in their collaborative show.

Lisa takes a more painterly approach, while Stephen tends toward photographic-quality work. Lisa hones on the portrait, while Steven dramatizes Billy's environment. Lisa presents the world through a multiplicity of figures, while Stephen use Billy as his central character; Lisa dresses up her figures, while Stephen adorns Billy in a uniform. Lisa uses ornate, Baroque-style frames, while Stephen prefers photographic mattes and basic black.

Side by side, these divergent elements reflect back on each other, female to male, painterly to photographic, memory to experience, real life to make-believe.

TAPPING THE MEDIA

The Grays started as photographers but now work exclusively in digital collage, culling source material from books, popular magazines, the Web sources. They even steal it from each other. Steven plucked a wedding gown out of Lisa's "Mystery Date," and Lisa ripped off the chair from Steven's "Making Bad Relationships Good."

They don't always tell each other, either. And though soft-spoken, they can get competitive.

If one creates something phenomenal, the other tries to the raise the bar, Stephen said, and each always tells the other when something flat-out doesn't work. One way or another, they regularly influence each other's ideas, often just by tossing them around. Lisa uses more comic humor in the current show in response to Stephen's work, just as Stephen uses richer colors.

Photographer Hal Gage has followed the Grays' work for at least a decade, influenced in no small part by their ability to build complex bodies of work and show some of it in galleries on both coasts, but also because he finds their work socially and culturally compelling.

From a technical standpoint, Gage notes how the Grays embrace the flaws of the medium. By duplicating an image to make a larger one, or enlarging a low-resolution image, flaws become more pronounced and pixels pick up the wrong color, Gage said. "And they just use that kind of stuff for texture."

Their acceptance and even embellishment of "flaws" reminds Gage of photography from the 1960s and '70s that made graininess an aesthetic preference or aspect of the subject matter.

In other words, rather than concealing the way the medium works or the existence of pixels from multiple images, the Grays exaggerate and play around with those things, using them almost like brush strokes, Gage said.

Both Grays consider subversion a core artistic belief, after all, which might explain why they use childish characters and the perceived innocence of childhood to address mature themes.

"Being a child is maybe being allowed to be more subversive and being able to act out," Lisa said. "Billy can go around hitting things and chopping off heads. It's maybe even expected. But adults have to sublimate those impulses. It's OK for girls to play dress-up, but there's a time when they have to be careful."

In art, as in life, posing observations and questions in unexpected ways can shift perspective and point of view in the service of understanding how and why we do the things we do.

As Stephen put it, "I find it far more interesting to take the traditional and turn it on its head to reach the subversive, because that gives people more to think about and chew on."

Find Dawnell Smith online at adn.com/contact/dsmith or call 257-4587.