Faculty Emeritus Crystal Hurdle is reinventing herself in retirement by teaching creative writing to seniors, crafting junk journals, painting, tapestry weaving, and writing fiction. She is author of After Ted & Sylvia, Teacher’s Pets, and Sick Witch. Syl-lo-Therapy will be published in 2026.
“Introduced at seventeen to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) in a university criticism class, I have never recovered from my initial feelings of awe and horror. In the early nineties, I taught it as part of a fiction course at Capilano University (then College). This is the one book I would bring to a desert island, encountering a new world each time I re-read it. As commanding first-person narrator, predatory lover (?) Humbert allows little of Lolita’s feelings except for rare and poignant slips such as “her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep” (176). Lolita haunts. I wrote some of the poems in my forthcoming collection, Syl-Lo-Therapy, as early as 2005 but most in the summer of 2022, when she demanded more voice than she’d been given. In ‘Lolita at the Gallery,’ I imagine Humbert Humbert as a pedophiliac curator in a visual and textile art exhibition based on Lolita. I would pay big bucks to see this show and to purchase all of the works!
“Works consulted for ‘Lolita at the Gallery’ include Jacob Rodenburg’s The Book of Nature Connection 70 Sensory Activities for All Ages!; the Griffin Art Projects’ Per Diem: The Gerd Metzdorff Collection; and the Vancouver Art Gallery’s pamphlet / colouring book for its 2022 Kids Take over exhibit 2022.
“Falk, Pratt, and Riley are contemporary female artists. Names of the exhibitors and critics have been fabricated from various names in Lolita.“
“I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita” (309).
Excerpts from the Program for a Self-guided Tour (far be it from us to waste paper!) of a Baker’s dozen of Deliciousness!
Sure to pique would-be artists, art historians, art critics, literature scholars, art adventurers.
Warning: parents, this display is not suitable for children.
But in the interests of inclusivity, we have included questions where appropriate to guide your irreplaceable little tyke into the riches of art.
Curator’s note:
I was inspired by the never-diminishing popularity of Lolita and increasingly of Lolita herself, especially now in these dangerous days of mutated variants and climate change. Since childhood, Lolita in 3D has been a passion project for me as I’ve collected artworks about Lolita from all over the globe. The multi-media modality is especially thrilling, as is the setup in the nooks and crannies of the Fractious Gallery, where one never knows what one will find around the corner.
Mona Quilty’s No Turning Back, 2016
Odometers, plywood, tulle, wire, ribbon
A series of odometers, numbers fixed in the process of being about to turn to 000, each with a set of cartoonish angel wings attached.
Artist’s statement:
I’m interested in turning points, being poised in liminality. The odometer tracks not only a journey of how many miles, but also the emotional landscape. I share Lolita’s wonder in the odometer suddenly reading a succession of zeroes, and her wistful belief that if one puts the car in reverse, perhaps things will go backwards. What would happen if we could turn things back? We are always here in the moment of being about to turn to 000. None of them is actually set at 000: it has as yet to happen, and what will happen when it does?
The one set to 342 is simply my little inside joke, as the numbers are not even ballpark changing over, but 342 is both the number of the Haze house in Ramsdale and the room at the Enchanted Hunters.
I like working with instruments of fine measure. The wings are meant to give a sense of flying, but the odometers are firmly planted on the ground.
Art critic’s comment (Rosaline McCoo, review for The Georgia Straight):
The static nature of the installation is belied by the childlike wings…. The hovering liminal shapeshifting present. All we have is now and still now. Quilty reminds us to carpe when we diem in this astonishingly real piece that promises so much and delivers more beyond the 0000000.
Child’s guide for family second Sundays at the gallery:
Wear one of the sets of dollar store angel wings set aside for this purpose (in the pretty bin) and do a dance to show how this exhibit or any of the other exhibits makes you feel. Very good. Do it again. Yes, do it with your sister, too! Let me video it. Again, please. You went so fast I didn’t have time to film it!
Richard Rigg’s My Travels with HimHum, 1986
1950s map of the USA with actual adverts for soda shops, tires, Cozy Cabins; pins from Rigg’s grandmother’s sewing collection, including some gigantic hatpins that resemble skewers, millinery
Vintage road map of USA, complete with red pushpins for every night’s rest and rape and blue pins marking where ice cream was consumed and white pins where tennis and swimming happened. The pattern, shockingly, resembles the American flag.
Artist’s statement:
I wanna show that like you know America is like complicit in child porn, know what I mean? And I like wanna pay homage to my wonderful grandma! She rocked!
Click here if you think the triple scoop cone corresponded to the three f’s of fondling, fellatio, and fucking. We all rock!
Mona Quilty’s The Bike, 2018
Water fountain bicycle kinetic sculpture in brass, leather, mixed metal, water from an underground source
Girl’s junior Bike with the usual bell replaced by an old-timey Doorbell like a nipple and an air horn. When wind blows from a well-placed fan in the gallery, plastic candy-striped tassels (offering the illusion of freedom) fly behind as if in a sou’wester. Press the nipple and the horn squeals. Touch the seat and water erupts from the bucket basket in front, causing the pedals to turn, conjuring a ghost of a rider.
Initial recorded interview with artist (for ArtsyFartsy Journal):
I: Mona, tell us about your process! I understand this took you most of a year?
MQ: Nine months.
I (musing): The length of a pregnancy.
MQ: Don’t push it. The Bike is set up like the Mousetrap game—
I: Not invented until well after Lo died—
MQ (waves away the reservation): Where would art be without anachronism? (sees the interviewer is about to speak) Simply a rhetorical question! No need to, I mean, Do NOT RESPOND! How Lo would have enjoyed playing it, several hours well wasted.
I (nodding): Humbert would have hated its vacuousness, no intellect or cunning involved, unlike in chess. And I loved playing Mousetrap as a kid—
MQ: My prototype had several stages which became increasingly untenable. It would take ten minutes from pressing the bell to the movement of the pedals as the marble-like piece fell from a great height, zigzagged down a course of roof gutters, until it finally tipped the cardboard cutout of Humbert, as in a dunk tank.
I (clapping hands): How I loved plopping mean teachers into dunk tanks at spring fairs!
MQ: Hmmm. Because Lolita loves swimming and cycling, I wanted the watery bike ride to become her reality. Because she liked tennis, an earlier version featured a ball and racquet, but it had to be angled just so, and the figure of Humbert would not snap back up, so I eliminated tennis. The piece manifests Dolly torn between two of the three sports she loved. After touching the seat, does the water, a.k.a. swimming, cause the pedals to turn (cycling), or does that action bring about the water fountain?
I (wisely): The blurring of cause and effect thus appropriate.
MQ: Quite right. In a prototype, a dildo appeared on the bicycle seat.
I (gasping): Wha–?
MQ: You heard me. The pressing of the doorbell nipple caused, well, you know, but I thought Lolita was already unsubtle enough. I would have liked some element of chance, but unfortunately, this is a closed system.
I: Regrettable.
MQ: Press the nipple only once. Touch the seat. Be gentle. I said, be gentle! Try it one more time, buster, and you’ll be banned from the exhibition!
Annabel McFate’s Sticker Shock when Safely Solipsized, 2015-2016
Oversize image of Lo’s apple before it was consumed as Humbert masturbated—made from over one thousand various PLU (price look-up) number stickers, the image appropriately shaded and shadowed
Complete with magnifying glass for better viewing of the individual stickers.
Art critic’s comment (Monique Knight, shortie for Art News):
While many lesser artists would have been satisfied with using mass quantities of the same PLU sticker, Annabel McFate has made a political statement by her choices: using multiples of twenty-seven different PLU stickers, corresponding to that many varieties, grades, and sizes of apple. She uses mostly those with four digits, showing growth with pesticides (suggesting Humbert’s pestilence), as opposed to the five digits for organic or genetically modified.
The artist calls your attention to the fact that such a sticker cannot be recycled, so it is extremely hard to dispose of the nightmarish aberration. In pursuit of her art, McFate marred many apples to remove said stickers with minimal damage, later forced to cook them up rather than dealing with the rot. (McFate wants the viewer to understand that she doesn’t even like apples that much, and applesauce even less.) She was shocked to discover the corruption often disguised beneath the sticker, seemingly purposefully used to cover up a blemish before it turned into a bruise. (See separate video installation at nearby Galleria Gallery of the apple-eating over fourteen days in two fall seasons in which she is dressed like a schoolgirl, her hair in pigtails.)
McFate has clearly thrown herself into her work. One wonders what Gathie Falk would think of this?
(Lolita’s Apple Speaks
I am tired of my signification
Why is it always temptation
the Garden of Eden
Eve and phallic symbols
serpent like a Thanksgiving
pig but with me in its fangs?
Crackling flesh fearsome
I want nothing lewd
no cloying flesh
I don’t want to be Delicious)
Child’s guide for family second Sundays at the gallery:
In the book Lolita, after Humbert played with himself while she joggled next to him on the couch, having eaten her big, red, juicy apple, Lolita tried to toss its core into the fender. No, not the bumper of a car; it’s like a fireplace screen. She seems a little piggy to me because what if she missed? You don’t want apple cores all over the living room rug! I like to eat my cores, seeds, stems, and all, to leave no evidence. What about you?
Use all your senses. Put your fingers behind your ears and pull them forward so that you look like Dumbo. What do you hear when you get up close to the exhibit? Sounds of “Carmen,” obnoxiously loud apple crunching, or sobs in the night?
Rita Gold’s Cherries, Cherry Pie and Remains of a Hot Fudge Sundae, 2011, 2012, 2013
Paired tapestries of wool, cotton, polymer (48″ x 48″)
Fruits of wool, plaster of Paris, acrylic paint
Diptych tapestries of, respectively, a slice of cherry pie removed from an aluminum pie plate and a glass dish licked clean of a sundae. Between them, assorted cherries in plaster of Paris and felted wool.
Art critic’s comment (Monique Knight, shortie for Art News):
Rita Gold is known as the Mary Pratt of textiles (even more so than the risqué Erin M. Riley) with her attention to the daily, the quotidian, enhanced by a spectacular quality of light. The tapestries’ warp, unseen, is fishing line, suggesting the caughtness [sic.] of the eater. The central image of the object, devoid of background, heightens same. Cherries in their repeated iteration and in various forms lead one to think of all the connotations of cherry, including the elusive hymen. One thinks of Jeanette Winterson’s naughty title, Sexing the Cherry (2000).
Child’s guide for family second Sundays at the gallery:
What do you like to eat? I like twisting Oreo cookies apart. Did you notice that the critic Monique Knight seems to comment on only the artwork about food? Maybe her husband thinks she’s fat and she doesn’t have enough to eat? Maybe she’d be better off working as a restaurant reviewer? What do you think? (What do you taste?)
What is it about enlarging an everyday object that makes it seem like art? Andy Warhol painted huge labels of Campbell’s soup, and he is very famous, and no one calls him a copycat.
What things do you see and use every day? Draw something, but Big it! That might be something you’ll have to do when you get home. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough free paper for the public here at Fractious Gallery. Let’s play with size in another way by making something very small. Trace your hand on the piece of paper provided. Then draw yourself, but make sure it fits inside the thumb you have just drawn. You can put other family members in your fingers.
Carmen Valechka’s Mani-Pedo, 2022, and accompanying performance piece, continuing
Mixed media on paper 73 inches width x 47 inches height, poem with magazine cut-outs of Disneyfied characters.
On second Sundays, child participants, for twenty dollars each, can have their toenails or fingernails (both for thirty-five dollars) painted by artist / manicurist “Carmen Valechka.” Subsequent sibling for the low price of an additional ten dollars….
Poem by an Anonymous Student in response to the exhibit:
Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert, as Scar,
all those pretty talons
foot in the door
his purple painted toenails
filed to pointy perfection
wolf in sheep’s clothing
Red Riding Hood’s bad wolf wears
a hat of Bartholomew Gubbins
all the better to tempt little girls with
his claws
French manicured
he deplores the upkeep
of the manicure-pedicure
but a combination is good value
all the better to draw little girls in
who want to know exactly the shade of pretty pink
as they hold his pinky finger between their tiny hands
not seeing the fuchsia uvula
what pink is that called?
as he widens his maw
unhooks his jaw
and takes each in whole
totally consumed
a pretty pink gullet
Dr. Seuss’ Horton hears a who
but who hears a Hortense
clutching the manicured fingers
—how business-like—
of a tall creature as he takes her into the back room
swimming pool game
Marco!
Polo!
Marco!
Polo!
nearby a discarded nail file
high arches, pointy toes, so many claws!
the wet pawprints
((Mar co
ooohh))
Child’s guide for family second Sundays at the gallery:
Continue past the third room in the corner where you’ll find a sign that says “Private. Only staff beyond this point,” but you can trust me. Tiptoe along, use your fingers to trail along the left wall to find your way in the dark. I’ll be waiting with a splendid surprise!
All delicious wishes, The Curator
