New Times on Angela Ellsworth

New Times does one of its perceptive profiles on local artists, this one on Angela Ellsworth, whose discomfiting examinations of the psychic baggage she carries as a descendent of one of the prophets of the Mormon church has drawn her worldwide interest.

Writes Kathleen Vanesian:

Ellsworth’s most recent body of work […] directly confronts issues of the lives of Mormon women pioneers, polygamy, forced communal domesticity, and a look at sister wives through a homo-social lens. Ellsworth went international with her latest creations at the 17th Biennale of Sydney, a by-invitation-only art exhibition held in Australia’s capital city every two years. Now an entire world has come under the sway of solemn sister wives doing the Electric Slide in pastel prairie dresses, hairdos with frontal poufs, and strap-on braids.

Ellsworth is a lot more provocative than you might expect. Here’s something to make you think:

Turning her attention momentarily from fat, cancer, and bodily fluids, Angela Ellsworth has, in recent years, thematically mined the mother lode of her Mormon heritage and how it relates to issues raised by her acknowledged homosexuality. She likens recent polygamy prosecutions of FLDS members [that’s the Warren Jeffs-led breakaway sect] to the continuing stigmatization of same-sex marriages, which at present are, not unlike polygamy, still prohibited by law in most of the United States.

“I’m interested in the non-hetero-normative relationships in both queer culture and in polygamy,” Ellsworth told her rapt ASUAM audience. “And I want to talk about it. These are very contemporary issues, all complicated by a general fear of anything that’s outside of a hetero-normative frame. For me, that’s underneath all of it.”