BLEEDING ART: Elizabeth McGrath

Elizabeth McGrath survived a punk kid’s worst nightmare. It was the early ’80s, and McGrath was a 13-year-old L.A. hellion with spiky boots and a tri-hawk haircut. One day, her parents said they were taking her to the zoo. Instead, they took her to Victory Christian Academy, a Fundamentalist Baptist correctional school. She was there a year, spending her first month locked in a closet-like space called the Get Right With God Room. Girls would sit in the hall praying for her in shifts while she was subjected to bright lights and loud religious tapes 24/7. She had to pee in a bucket.

Flash-forward a couple of decades, and McGrath, now nicknamed Bloodbath McGrath by pals, has blossomed into one of L.A.’s wildest, sexiest characters. She is a rising star in the lowbrow art movement, a punk princess who sculpts bizarre little monsters, fronts a band called Miss Derringer with her tattoo artist husband, and does the occasional modeling job dolled up in corsets and fishnets. Not only did Victory Christian Academy fail to crush McGrath’s rebellious spirit, it’s possible the tortuous treatment she received there gave her the touch of madness that makes her art so unforgettable. (Click the image at top left to buy McGrath's book, Everything That Creeps.)

McGrath’s subject matter can be the stuff of goth cliché – she’s big on sideshow freaks, tragicomic human-animal hybrids and folks with an extra head or two. But there’s nothing cliché about her execution, and each piece seethes with life. She bases her sculptures on the foam animal forms sold in taxidermy supply places, building them up with resin, roofing tar, leather and whatever else is handy to create beasties that are both cartoonish and disturbingly lifelike. Their skin is pale and mottled, and they look like they’re in the final stages of some terrible consumptive disease.... But those sweet, sparkling glass eyes can make you fall in love at first sight.

You could exhaust yourself exploring a single McGrath piece. She places many of her sculptures inside elaborate shadow boxes – works of art in themselves, their surfaces squirming with carved monkeys, painted mermaids, and messages spelled out in grand sideshow fonts. Inside those boxes McGrath’s characters inhabit their own claustrophobic little worlds, decorated with dollhouse furniture and still more pictures on the walls. You can’t help but think of McGrath’s own confinement in the Get Right With God room, when she was locked away and treated like a monster. Her creatures stare out from their strange little cells, and some of them are sinister, some of them are lonesome, but all are unashamed of what they are. They don’t need your prayers.

In 2008, McGrath’s career has reached a kind of crossroads. Her sculptures are widely exhibited (she shows regularly at the Billy Shire gallery in Culver City) and she is just starting to get noticed in a big way. But as she gets famous and branches out into other art forms, she risks losing her focus. Her watercolors are cute but they lack the feral fascination of her sculptures. Her website sells T-shirts, cups and more, some of it looking a bit too much like the stuff on the shelves of your local Hot Topic. She puts a lot of time and energy into her band, but while Miss Derringer is fun, every minute she spends touring is a minute she’s not spending making the art that will be her true legacy.

Frankly, there are a million other ladies who could arguably do what McGrath does in Miss Derringer. But nobody else in the world can bring a lovesick, two-headed freak to life like McGrath can.

The folks at Victory Christian Academy would surely disagree.... But McGrath is doing God’s work, in her own wonderfully twisted way.

(This article originally appeared in LA Citybeat.

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