In artist Wendy Gadzuk’s Morongo Valley home, there’s a harmony between spiritual and dark symbolism. Images of Buddha and the Virgin Mary associate with her assemblages using feathers, animal bones, dolls and metal gears.
Gadzuk’s work is a marriage of beauty and darkness. One specific piece hanging in her kitchen is a doll’s head made to look like a demon in Hindu culture, with the skull of a bird at the top of its crown. Large blue feathers blow out of its frame. The eyes, made of white and blue gems, aqua beading around the neck and what resembles a beak for a mouth, are captivating and horrifying.
Some of Gadzuk’s work is included on The Hwy 62 Art Tours, which opens on Saturday and takes place over three weekends until Oct. 24. She’s No.15 on the tour at La Matadora Gallery, and her work will be displayed in the same space as artists Bunny Reiss and Colleena Hake.
One of Gadzuk’s four cats sits in her lap as she talks about traveling through Europe as a child, when she visited architectural sites and churches with her late father, physicist Bill Gadzuk. She wasn’t raised in any religion, but is drawn to the images, which inspire her work.
Gadzuk said a lot of religious imagery in Christianity humanizes its spiritual subject without revealing its troubled history, adding her boyfriend Tony was raised in a strict religious household and it “kind of messed with him.”
This became particularly evident when the pair went on a date to a Bay Area mission early in their relationship.
“I’m looking at it appreciating it from an artistic standpoint and he was in there thinking about all the indigenous people who were killed to wipe out their culture and force this wave of thinking and belief on them,” Gadzuk said. “Both of our experiences are validated, and it was interesting with what you grew up with affecting everything you experience.”
One piece that will be in the show, “The Sickness,” hangs in her studio. It resembles a birdhouse, but with a red doll head inside the hole and the structure is adorned with lace, pearls, locks of an ex-boyfriend’s hair and two vials of Gadzuk’s menstrual blood.
That piece is about relationships and how natural elements interact with each other, she said, even though the end result of that interaction isn’t always positive.
Most of her assemblages are centered on one figure, which she attributes to being an only child.
“I think that’s kind of how I related to that solitary experience and making things like altars, which are a space to honor or capture a certain experience, image, memory or feeling,” Gadzuk said.
In 2018, Tony’s health conditions led to a lengthy hospital stay and aftercare, which inspired her to start creating pieces out of medical waste. Items such as syringes, IV tubing, gauze and other discarded items that aren’t biohazardous became an entire series for Gadzuk. The pieces make a statement about an environmental impact and a horrific experience.
One assemblage piece resembles a Victorian candelabra, but instead of candles, it features syringes filled with pearls. The border is a combination of gauze, gold lace and plungers.
“Somebody looked at it and was like, ‘Oh wow, this piece looks like it’s about heroin addiction,’” Gadzuk said. “I never want to have a preconceived notion of how somebody is going to experience my work. What’s fascinating for me is hearing what their experience is and how it can differ completely from mine.”
‘I don’t always have a story’
Following a gallery show in Los Angeles in 2016, Gadzuk received a call from the owner telling her a couple was interested in buying one of her pieces — and wanted to know the story behind it. She could talk about her process, but didn’t have a special meaning behind the work to share with the couple.
“I don’t always have a story,” Gadzuk said. “Sometimes it reveals itself to me after I make the piece and I’m following a process where I start out with a general idea of where I’m going and it evolves as I go in. There’s always a point where I feel attached and fall in love with a piece, and I need to have that happen for it to be great.
The creative side of making art is also one Gadzuk sees as a journey of self-discovery. She had to “unlearn” the traditional methods of her art school education at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where every work needs to have a concept, idea and/or a statement before the work begins.
“You don’t need to have it all planned out, I’d be stuck and wouldn’t exist if that was the idea I worked with,” Gadzuk said.
One theme seems to be planned into almost all of her work — life and death. Gadzuk said rusted objects found in the desert, animal bones, snake skin and other refined materials represent this idea, adding, “Life is a process that embraces or encompasses birth to death, it’s all there.”
Gadzuk said she enjoys working with bones because she likes the way they look, and how they represent the pure essence of life — while also serving as a reminder of death.
But working with bones takes some getting used to, and cleaning them takes a great deal of trial and error.
The first time she explored this medium was after attending a Thanksgiving dinner with her now ex-boyfriend’s family. She took the turkey carcass home and learned that if she boiled it, she could soften the bones.
She recently found a coyote carcass and is making preparations to remove its flesh. Gadzuk said there are two ways to do this: using beetles or putting them in a bucket of water and letting the bacteria eat the flesh.
“It smells so bad, I’m glad I live somewhere with outdoor space. It’s not a glamorous process,” she said.
Reconnecting with music in the desert
Before moving to Morongo Valley in 2016, Gadzuk lived in Tucson, Arizona, Los Angeles and Oakland, where she worked in a restaurant and suffered a repetitive stress injury from carrying food trays. In recent years, when it become unaffordable to live in the Bay Area because of gentrification, she and Tony looked at moving to the desert.
“I love the landscape and the one thing that sold us on this house was the night sky,” Gadzuk said. “Living in the Bay Area, you don’t see stars. I love being able to have some outside space to go for a walk or look up at the sky.”
Aside from visual art, Gadzuk is also a musician and plays guitar. She’s been in the bands Whiskey Bitch, Cockpit, Suckerstar — with Betty Blowtorch members Blare N. Bitch and Sharon Needles — and in the 440s with ex-husband Dave Chamillard before disbanding in 2004.
A guitar player since 15, she counts late Motörhead guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke as an inspiration. Following the death of bassist and vocalist Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister in 2015, she and another Bay Area musician, Beth Allen, had plans to start a Motörhead tribute band called Motördead.
Motördead practiced in Gadzuk’s East Oakland loft and made a setlist of songs to learn, but it didn’t materialize until both she and Allen moved to the desert four miles away from each other.
“I have so many guitars, but this one guitar I was going to use for this band hadn’t been played since we had gotten together. When I opened up the case, all our notes and the setlist from when she came to my place in Oakland were in there,” Gadzuk said.
Facilitating conversation through art
During The Hwy 62 Art Tours, Gadzuk plans to have other items for sale, such as her “Deconstructed Divination” deck of oracle cards and an accompanying book, “The Magic Of 8” that shows each card with a Haiku poem. The book is dedicated to her father, who died in January.
This is the first time Gadzuk will be featured on the tour. She’s done gallery shows at La Matadora Gallery before and enjoys the experiences people share with her after looking at the art.
“I guess the most important thing is that whatever they feel or see facilitates some sort of communication, and I think that’s the most important thing,” Gadzuk said.
Desert Sun reporter Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye.
