This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 1, 2010 - "Scratch & Sniff," the new works by Mississippi-based Katherine Rhodes Fields at Good Citizen Gallery, appear at first to be witty one-liners: prints of centerfold nudes surrounded by luscious, suggestive foods, with giant "scratch & sniff" circles strategically placed on their naughty parts.
There's "MS Sticky Buns" swimming in a sea of cinnamon rolls, a brown-sugar sniff circle on her bum; "MS Sour Puss" wallows in lemon wedges; "MS Cheri" is nearly buried in cherry pie. They're beautifully composed, full of amusing visual and verbal puns, and the scratch & sniff scents are right on target. But if you consider them casually, you only scratched the surface, and risk missing other layers of meaning they offer up.
Fields' choice of nude models is very deliberate, limited to Playboy magazine centerfolds from the 1960s and 1970s. That was an interesting period as those things go -- the body types, shapes and poses in the centerfolds were more varied, a far cry from the more cookie-cutter standards the magazine has adopted in recent decades. Fields draws out their idiosyncrasies in her choices of foods.
In "Ms Cheesy Snack," the golden-tanned, platinum blond centerfold figure inexplicably dangles her fingers in a goldfish bowl, so Fields surrounds her in goldfish crackers.
"MS Finger Licking Good" lies on her back, her legs folded and tucked close to her body, her tongue glossing over her lips erotically; she's surrounded by fried chicken wings with an oily bronze sheen that rivals the model's skin tone.
Fields has manipulated and enlarged the centerfold images, but she retains the connection to their source; look closely and you'll see the original fold lines, or even small rips in the paper, reminders that they have been lifted from magazines. Yet she chooses to print them on large sheets of vinyl, a material associated with commercial advertisements and trade-show banners.
Then there's the scratch & sniff dimension, a commercial gimmick Field marshals here to heighten the intimacy of our engagement with the figures. (Field herself is intimately involved in the projects, collecting, slicing, cooking and photographing all the food, and mixing up batches of gritty scent coating.) Field's prints are neither apologies for nor indictments of the traffic in such images. Instead, by recontextualizing them, Fields both thickens their sensuality and examines their appeal.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.