F  L  A  U  N  T

 "Kids and Guitars." (2011). Oil pastel on paper 47 x 68 inches. Courtesy the artist. America’s not as White as it once was, but you wouldn’t guess it by looking at Mercedes Helnwein’s sketches and paintings. Pale-skinned females dominate her pieces, an aspect of her body of work that is uncomfortably out of touch with her culturally enmeshed Los Angeles surroundings. That Helnwein herself didn’t realize until recently that her subjects are predominantly white demonstrates just how convincingly anachronistic her style is, channeling an Americana era long gone.  “Yeah, I actually noticed that too,” she says. “And I think it comes from –there’s like, something a little bit, almost old fashioned in a Victorian kind of way that creeps in there sometimes, so I think innately I was looking for a really kind of pale, old fashioned looking girl.” All her work is attached to America “by an umbilical cord,” Helnwein has said before, and she repeats this sentiment to me. “America for me has been a huge inspiration since I was a teenager….The religious billboards, the radio programs, the weird little towns, the churches—everything that might seem very mundane to Americans who live there, to me it \[is\] like Disneyland.” Despite growing up in Ireland and Germany, her work is almost entirely derivative of her current surroundings, the vast and culturally divisive landscape of the U.S., which became her second home a decade ago. Her perspective of America, though ten years groomed by now, is uniquely that of an outsider, and it lends an interesting angle to her art that American-born artists aren’t as easily privy to. Helnwein’s detailed sketches and eerily moody oil paintings have a distinctly old-fashioned quality to them that recall an abandoned era of the American housewife as perpetually coiffed, caparisoned, and disturbed by boredom, psychosis, or both. Imagine that, while you were out, your wife suffered a fit of boredom and smashed every last plate you own on the kitchen floor. The kind of face she’s making when you get home might be something you see in one of Helnwein’s sketches: bemused, perplexed, guilty, or perhaps all three. Mirroring that era’s tension between projecting perfection while operating at a constant simmer, Helnwein’s characters—often appearing in mono-chromatric, portraiture-style postures—tend to belie emotions with beauty while hinting that something is amiss.  “With visual work, you can be very vague,” Helnwein says, adding that her written work—another artistic pursuit of hers—pins her down much more decidedly to exact representations. It’s that ability to dodge questions about what exactly is at play in her art that frees Helnwein to incorporate seemingly anachronistic or ill-fitting themes into her work. What does it mean when an old-fashioned women peers into your eyes holding a plastic stegosaurus? That’s for you to figure out, which is part of the fun of her work. Recently aware of her monocultural subjects, Helnwein’s setting her sights on a more broadly diverse pool of women, which could produce an interesting juxtaposition of her old-fashioned themes and the reality of America’s contemporary demographic. Though she does depict males on occasion, her focus is decidedly fixed on the female, and of late, she’s fascinated by teen females. “With each series, my interested changes a little bit, but recently I’ve been interested in younger girls, from 13 to 18, because it’s a very interesting time period in someone’s life because everything’s changing and nobody really knows—guys as well as girls—how to do…well, anything, basically. You’re falling in love and having your heart broken, but there are still childish ways of dealing with things and at the same time, you’re not as jaded as you would be when you’re older.” Up next, she’s working on a novel about a 15-year-old girl who falls in love with her biology teacher. “I feel like people that age have interesting solutions to problems,” she says, suggesting that we might learn more from her written characters than we can extract from her visual art. It’s a rarity to have that kind of insight to Mercedes artistic intentions, and she admits it will push her out of the comfort of veiling ideas in oil pastels and sketches. “Writing is such an explicit art form, it feels much more intense when you’re doing it,” she says. “There’s nowhere to hide.” * * * Written by: Quinn Aux Penn