Angela Ellsworth on Being Gay, the Mormon Church, and Her Increasing Artistic Success

The artist admits that "[f]or 15 years, I never talked about how I was raised or where I was raised and moved along with my life, bypassing a huge chunk of my formative years. Looking at this history now, I've started to move beyond the anger against the restricted and oppressive place that I felt within [the Mormon structure], and I feel like I'm looking at this history, particularly polygamy, and how contemporary Mormons want to separate themselves from that history."

Things get even more intriguing when it's revealed that Ellsworth, no longer a practicing Mormon, is an acknowledged lesbian in a committed, long-term marital relationship with Tania Katan, a writer, playwright, and actress currently performing in a one-woman show called Saving Tania's Privates. As a direct descendant of a Mormon prophet, Ellsworth is to be revered, but, notes Ellsworth, the fact that she's openly gay has worked against her as far as the Mormon Church is concerned. "BYU [Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City] invited me to be a visiting artist there but revoked the invitation when they found out I'm queer."

Tania Katan

Tania Katan

The sister wives do the Electric Slide during a "Meanwhile, back at the ranch" performance in Sydney.

Details

For information about Ellsworth's upcoming exhibits and performances, visit www.aellsworth.com

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More About

• Sydney Biennale
• Angela Ellsworth
• The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Visual Arts
• Polygamy

The homemade sunbonnets worn by 19th-century Mormon women, slowly trudging on foot as they pulled white oak handcarts through the inhospitable American wilderness, stand as the basic inspiration for Angela Ellsworth's "Seer Bonnets: A Continuing Offense," a sequel to related work first shown during "Underpinnings" at Lisa Sette Gallery in February 2009.

Her multimedia installation appeared in the main gallery of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, a coveted spot by any standards. It incorporated 12 handmade fabric bonnets — each of which represented one of her great-great-grandfather's wives — encrusted with thousands of old-time pearl-headed corsage pins and embellished with mysterious monochromatic patterns. Each bonnet was mounted on a custom-made, unfinished white oak pedestal that references the carts of the artist's Mormon pioneer ancestors.

"The pedestals of white oak were a pain to get into Australia because wood is a real problem [as a carrier for insects]," says the artist. "I was committed to making them out of white oak, which is what early Mormon pioneers all made their handcarts out of. There's no white oak in Australia, so we had to go through fumigating all those things."

Ellsworth's seer bonnets are not only patterned after the traditional pioneer bonnets that many Mormon colonizers wore, but are also exactly like ones used for Mormon Corridor history walks, historical reenactments that Mormon youth still undertake in high school and junior high. "They pull handcarts for three days," she says. "You can't eat for 12 hours — it's sort of durational. My mom wouldn't let me do it. I must have incorporated that in my own work, since I wasn't allowed to do it as a kid."

Ellsworth's pearl-laden bonnets are prickly in every sense of the word; though beautifully decorated on the outside, their reverse sides wickedly bristle with sharp, shimmering pinpoints. A devoted team of local volunteers, working alongside the artist over a period of months in her Phoenix studio, helped push between 19,000 and 22,000 pins into each bonnet, depending on the length of their exaggerated ties, most of which were around 70 inches long. During pin-pushing sessions, bonnets were referred to by the names of Snow's wives. Pins used to embellish them were purchased from a floral supply distributor in Arizona.

According to Ellsworth, the circular designs on each bonnet allude to Smith's visionary seer stones. She sees them as spiritual portals for their female wearers to access their own visionary powers: "The circles [are] my idea of giving the women wearing the bonnets their own visions and the possibility of seeing and translating things."

Those arcane designs could just as easily reference Masonic symbols — commonly attributed in many religious quarters to the occult — found on LDS temples and incorporated into the church's iconographic lexicon to this day. Joseph Smith, together with many of his church members, was a Freemason and, early on, adopted the secret society's symbols for liturgical and architectural use.

Ellsworth's Australian sculptural display was amplified by a performance piece she created to accompany her static art objects. Meanwhile, back at the ranch (2010) featured her mini-army of sister wives, who made their inaugural appearance in Compounded (2009) at Sette's "Underpinnings" opening and, later, performed in Chicago. In Sydney, they appeared on a number of occasions in the same gallery as the seer bonnets. Dressed similarly to women members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), a breakaway Mormon sect still practicing polygamy, Ellsworth's unmistakable crew of young women in athletic shoes were clad in ankle-length granny dresses in a rainbow of soft hues, sporting distinctive frontal hair poufs with single braids snaking down their backs.

The FLDS first came to national attention in 2008 with the arrest of polygamist FLDS leader Warren Jeffs (who specifically outlawed patterned fabric and the color red for his female followers). The artist told New Times that she initially ordered the plain Jane prairie dresses in 2008 directly from a fundraising FLDS website that has since closed, forcing her to find a local seamstress to replicate the dresses.

Looking as if they had just escaped from Little House on the Prairie, the Sydney sister wives silently entered the museum space en masse. Then, without any musical accompaniment, they would break into either the Electric Slide, a line dance first made popular in the U.S. during the '70s and still danced at family and coming-of-age events, or a couples' Sweetheart Dance. The performance crew included three ASU grad students, whose trips to the Biennale were paid for by the Herberger Institute. The three performed and also trained Australian volunteers for Ellsworth's performance. As a break between dances, the sister wives wandered through the gallery, sending unchoreographed, wordless communications to one another through touching both each other, themselves, and the architecture of the building.