Artists' exhibit makes monsters 'approachable'

Don't go looking for TV dinners in Jillian Guarco's freezer. In fact, don't expect anything edible. It's filled with bugs. Sound monstrous? Precisely.

Guarco, whose art is on display in a joint exhibit with Elizabeth Williams at Ciné entitled "Mighty Monsters," collects dead bugs to use in her pieces and stores extras where they'll last. The resulting pieces are the product, in part, of a childhood interest in bug collecting, but their content goes much deeper than entomology. In her statement for the series, Guarco indicates that each piece, which depicts two images of herself fused with the insects, represents "the monster I thought I was, and ... the person I wanted to become."

If Guarco is a monster, her beastly status comes at a good time in pop culture. Hype surrounding the October release of the movie version of "Where the Wild Things Are" and the popularity of monster toys such as "Uglydolls" seem to hint that monsters are gaining acceptance among humans.

Elizabeth Williams' pieces in the show take that sort of lighthearted approach to the subject. "I view (a monster) as a creature ... like on 'Sesame Street.' They have the monsters who are living among the humans. I try to make the monsters a little more approachable."

The resulting pieces have such names as "I think Gus is a Good Name for a Monster," and are sometimes cartoony, sometimes graffiti-influenced.

The women have very different approaches to creating their art: Guarco with painstaking hand work and Williams with intensive digital treatments.

The images in Guarco's bug series are the result of "me not taking 'no' for an answer to myself," she says.

The pieces are photographs of tiny dioramas Guarco built from cut-out self-portraits and the dead bugs. Sometimes she wears wings; in other pieces, the insects seem to be consuming her head. The idea initially had been conceived on a human-size scale, but Guarco realized she had a lot more freedom when she significantly scaled down her sets. It's easy, she notes, for artists to get caught up in " 'Oh, if I could only have this to work with, if only I had these materials to ma

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