Carnival of Grotesques

Her father owned a saloon that stank of liquor, vomit and urine. Her mother did the cooking there and never had time for reading bedtime stories. That is how Sculptress June Leaf, 39, chooses to remember her childhood on Chicago's West Side. With such a past, it is not surprising that her artistic heroes are Hogarth, Klee and Ensor, or that she has learned, from the hippies she says, "to see the kaleidoscopic side of life and the mind."

"It's all so tepid in the galleries," she complains. One exception is Manhattan's Frumkin Gallery, where she is currently having her first major show. The collection is a gaudy carnival of approximately life-size figures, stuffed, covered with canvas and painted in bright clashing colors. The total effect is anything but tepid, the figures looking something like characters cut out of Godard's Weekend.

Miss Leaf, who teaches life class at Manhattan's Parsons School of Design and is married to Jazz Saxophonist Joel Press, describes how she developed her unusual style of sculpture: "I was watching a friend upholster a couch and I got excited looking inside and seeing all the springs and workings. I thought I could use similar materials to make some big figures." One of her early efforts was a huge, whorelike Statue of Liberty reclining on a couch, done as a float for the Freedom Day Parade in Manhattan. "I liked her, but she was destroyed immediately by a band of Neo-Nazis," remembers Miss Leaf. "They tore her apart, I mean they really raped her."

Image of the Century. The grotesque, inanely smiling figures in the present show are not much subtler. Woman of Action shows a vapid peroxide blonde, mouth agape and with a skull and crossbones on her belt. "This is the American woman," says Miss Leaf. "She's trying so hard to contribute to American culture and doing such a lousy job of it."

The biggest and most theatrical of all the Leaf works is Street Dreams: The Ascension of the Pig Lady, a grouping of nine characters set in a shallow stage framed by a proscenium arch. Cast as a waitress with porcine pink cheeks and a snoutlike nose, the pig lady is about to be plucked up to heaven by a man and woman sprawling across the top of the arch. Explains Miss Leaf: "If there was going to be another Messiah, it would appear in someone who would never expect it, like a waitress, and she would turn into a pig, a big pink pig." Why a pig? "Because maybe a pig is the image of our century." While everybody grins, including the pig lady herself, another man spits and jabs at her with a club, an allusion to last summer's Chicago police riot. At the last minute, Miss Leaf added a reclining harlequin out in front by way of welcome. "Everyone is in that picture," she says. That includes her mom, who is the painted lady, second from the left.

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