Arts Magazine: I Wuv You

From Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program

I Wuv You

Growing up with artist for parents, Oakley Tapola, soon to be six, already shows a near inescapable talent for drawing, detail, and observation. But her artistic precocity and her first "group" show with her parents, in the "I Wuv You" exhibition opening February 19, 1993 in the Minnesota Gallery, leave her slightly shy and ambivalent. Asked what it feels like to be having her works shown in a museum along with her parents', Oakley makes a silly face and shrugs. Art-her own or her parents hanging on walls is evidently nothing remarkable in her experience. Art is life, life is art. The family that paints together, stays together. "Oakley talks about 'the studio' the way other people talk about the rec room or the kitchen," say her mother, Melba Price. With one studio, her mother's upstairs in their home, and another, her father's, in the garage, Oakley simply assumes that making art is what families do. Together the threesome-Oakley, Melba, and father Bruce Tapola-are using their "I Wuv You" show, part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, to make some statements about true family cohesion and both the legitimate and illegitimate uses of love and family association. Billed as a "nuclear family production," the show, according to its organizer Frank Gaard, a member of the artists panel of MAEP, offers a glimpse of a family with creativity as its center.

The show's tongue-in-cheek starting point, according to Tapola, is the degradation of love embodied in cutesy plastic "I Love You This Much" statues.

"There's something awful about those plastic models," he says. "The true emotion is completely obscured in them. So we're using these dumb, smarmy things as a contrast to what love really means."

Through the heart-shaped entrance to the gallery one sees on the far wall an eighteen-foot. Neanderthal family, a reminder of the family's endurance as a social unit, placing the viewer somewhere on the aeons-old continuum.

Price and Tapola's most ambitious collaboration in the show is a wall of one hundred faces. The acrylic, charcoal, and gouache paintings, each twenty-two by thirty inches, raise questions about human connections with both blood relations-past, present, and future-and the mass of humanity. The paintings are the best place to see the contrast in styles of Price and Tapola, both of whom like to work mostly with figures, but Tapola's tending more toward caricature. "My work in general is usually more personal," says Price. "His is more political."

Tapola gives rein to his wry humor in a sort of "family of man" tree, tracing in acrylic on masonite the evolution of the species, with Phyllis Schlafly below an amoeba. Humor erupts again in a kind of a word-association exercise ("some people have called it a defective flow chart," he says) using family. The associations include "Patridge," "Manson," Sly and Stone," "Ties."

In a deliberate twist, Oakley's work gets the traditional museum treatment-neatly framed and hung in a row, gallery style, but at kid's