A detail from The Index, Montreal artist David Altmejd's bird-obsessed installation at this year's Venice Biennale. (Ellen Page Wilson/Andrea Rosen Gallery, N.Y./(c) David Altmejd)

It’s rare that a rainy morning can actually enhance an art opening, but when a decaying giant werewolf and life-size men with birds’ heads are on display, rain can only heighten the eerie feel of the exhibit. David Altmejd’s installation at this year’s Venice Biennale is enigmatically called The Index. With its scattering of little stuffed birds, severed limbs, decapitated werewolf heads, plastic flowers and trees and mirrors, crystals and birdmen, it presents a gothic-kitsch mingling of mythological tip-offs.
  
Altmejd is himself a rare bird. Six years after graduating with a master’s in fine arts from Columbia University, the Montreal artist has soared fast and far in the international art scene. After numerous high-profile shows in New York, he was picked up by the prestigious Andrea Rosen Gallery and has now landed on one of modern art’s highest branches: representing Canada at the top art show in the world.

The Index consists of two separate sculptures. The first looks a bit like two parade floats, decorated with fake squirrels, birds, trees, mushrooms and flowers; gold chains and a mirrored bridge connect the two parts. On both “floats” stand life-size men in suits with haunting grey eyes and birds’ heads, with testicles hanging from their chins. On one float, the birdman stands triumphantly atop, clutching the decapitated head of a werewolf, which could be a reference to biblical tales like David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes, St. John the Baptist or nothing — take your pick. Altmejd uses mirrors to amplify and complicate the scattered horror.

The second sculpture is of a reclining giant werewolf in a state of decay — though no ordinary decay. Crystals grow out of hollows in the limbs, mushrooms sprout from the remains of tendons, little birds eggs nestle in crevices and small animals roam the hollows. The groin area, which has a sparkly and flaccid penis and testicles, also features crystals and mirror spikes, creating a sense of energy shooting upward.

What’s most affecting in Altmejd’s work is the childlike aspect of it, which is where the tension lies. The mushrooms and logs and stuffed birds look like props from a grade-school play; yet placed alongside the mirrors and birdmen and body parts, the goofy innocence is both underlined and undermined, creepy and funny.

While his work stubbornly refuses any narrative, Altmejd loads it with what he calls “narrative potential.” His influences, however, do have thematic cohesion. They include French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose giant spider sculpture sits beside the National Gallery in Ottawa, and German-born American Kiki Smith, who uses mythology and symbols relating animals and humans. The show’s commissioner, Louise Dery, jokingly draws a connection with “the other Davids”: namely, directors Cronenberg and Lynch, as well as the marble colossus by the great one himself, Michelangelo.

Indeed, there is something very Davidesque about Altmejd’s giant werewolf: the size (about 5.5 metres), the colour (white), the casual set of the hips and relaxed hand and the touch of homoeroticism. Altmejd’s giant sits on the floor leaning against the wall, likely because the low, slant-ceilinged, C-shaped Canadian pavilion makes any other position impossible. (While the pavilion bears out the cabin-in-the-woods cliché dear to many Europeans, it’s a bane for most artists who show here.)

Another influence that struck me immediately was of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Both he and Altmejd mix the real and the faux-mythical, fairytale and symbolic allusions to create unsettling worlds. Borges’s narratives accomplish this by hinting at horror, whereas Altmejd spreads out a yard sale of disquieting elements to bring on the shivers.

Altmejd works on The Giant 2, a new project, in his studio. (Ellen Page Wilson/Andrea Rosen Gallery, N.Y./Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London/(c) David Altmejd)

I literally chased down the artist in the little woods behind the pavilion after I spied him darting behind a shrub. (I later learned he was hoping to rehearse his opening speech there.) Altmejd is just 32, and has the gosh-golly good looks of a Jake Gyllenhaal, without the high-voltage eyes. He’s disarmingly unaffected, dressed in white tennis shoes and a black suit jacket I suspect was the only one he owns. We stood under a dripping pine tree as it drizzled around us. Altmejd has that rare combination of being both timid and remarkably confident. He’s also no hipster, and it may in part be a willingness to risk looking silly that makes his work so appealing.

“When I’m building a sculpture, I like to make myself laugh,” Altmejd admits. “I like to kind of make myself nervous at the idea that someone would be shocked, or you know, I become shy in my own studio, just thinking, ‘Oh, I’m putting testicles on the face of a birdman!’ It makes me shy and that makes me feel like what I’m doing really exists, like’s it’s real.”

Altmejd began working with werewolves in a group exhibit in New York in 2001 called demonclownmonkey, and it’s become a feature in all his work.

“It felt like the piece was complex enough and had enough open doors that it could be the generator for other pieces,” he says of the 2001 show.

He chose the werewolf as an alternative to the human figure, which he sees as having been artistically over-explored. Werewolves and birdmen, he says, have enough similarities with the human body for people to be able to relate to them; but there are also enough differences for things to get weird. Altmejd also likes the connections his work makes between animals and insects and nature.

“I really like the idea that someone could be open-minded enough to walk into a gallery and relate to the work as they relate to nature. To just let themselves be fascinated by the fact that what they’re in front of is something that’s weird that exists in this world,” says Altmejd.  “It breathes the same air, has the same presences, exists in the same world. It doesn’t exist just as a representation, like a painting or drawing.”

Most of the people I later watched making their way through Altmejd’s exhibit seemed to respond viscerally to the sculptures, barely resisting the urge to touch a fake squirrel, bird or one of the little phallic mushrooms scattered about. I witnessed more than one person jump back, startled by an eerie reflected bird’s eye or decapitated head. (One funny exception was a British mother-daughter duo, who charged toward the rotting giant, whereupon the mother pronounced it “ghastly.” The daughter said, “Good,” with a sharp nod of agreement, and they turned on their heels and exited. Cheerio!)

Altmejd is more than happy to disturb. He wants to make “shiver-inducing” work, and talks a lot about energy and creating dynamic tensions between different objects and symbols. Some of that tension is polar — the juxtaposition of death and life, like the rotting werewolf sculpture with cavities filled with eggs or repulsive textures alongside sparkles and mirrors. But he also likes to pack his art with things that suggest transformation — the crystals, travelling gold chains, flowers, mushrooms and, of course, werewolves. He compares the process of his art to the gradual metamorphosis that a human body undergoes.

“We change every day, we do, continuously,” he says, with youthful earnestness. “Every day, there’s something a little different, because we have special experiences. Maybe they don’t make you transform immediately, but in two years from now, you’re going to be very different.”

If he weren’t so damn sweet, I might not be able to resist the urge to say, “Look kid, try childbirth, serious illness or pushing past 40. Then let’s talk about bodily transformation.” But then, given what he’s already done with transformation and metamorphosis at a relatively young age, I have no doubt his work will only get more interesting.

“I needed to find a way of making sculpture where I’d feel special,” says Altmejd. “But once that was made, and my language started to become richer and richer, I feel like the work took the power. And now it’s evolving at its own speed, like a natural thing.”

David Altmejd’s The Index is on display at the Venice Biennale until November.

Megan Williams is a Canadian writer based in Rome.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.