Monster Mash

There's a monster behind you, below you, above you, around you. It's a monster that looks too close to human. It's a monster with emotion, with intent. It's a monster that gives birth to the beauty around you. It's a monster made to haunt you. It's a monster made by you.

This is the world of Lauren Youngsmith's Monster Month series, a set of eight beautiful ink and acrylic drawings currently on display at [gallery name]. There are two pieces corresponding with each season, color-coded, though there's no intention of sequencing. Each drawing can stand alone, as Youngsmith's wonderful use of a light acrylic wash combined with the ink cross-hatching gives each piece its own movement. The eye is drawn to the large chimeric monsters that take up most of the painting and is led from them to the humans that are unknowingly haunted by the beasts.

The monsters are fascinating. They live on the line between cartoonish and ghoulish. Each feels scary but clearly the work of someone interested in comics. Youngsmith isn't trying to scare the viewer. The monsters are involved almost banally with their humans' lives. One's drool causes a personal downpour for an umbrella'd man. Another holds up mistletoe above two oblivious lovers on a frozen lake. Their actions are for the most part not insidious. It's the emotion they have that's startling, an emotion remarkably subtle for a pen-and-ink drawing. The monsters exist only to perform some function in a human's life, but they go unnoticed and they have no motivation. We've created a world of monsters that go out of their way to craft the mundane realities of our world but are incapable of becoming aware of that.

Youngsmith's comic book sensibility only enhances how enjoyable and weirdly profound the series is. It makes me wonder if I'd want to live in the world she depicts. And then I wonder if I already do.