A Wild Bunch

Hunkered down in the shared workspace at the back of the Pittsfield Contemporary Gallery in downtown Pittsfield, Mass., Huckleberry DelSignore is grappling with a challenge.

“Right now I’m trying to put stripes on a tiger—that’s been difficult,” says the diminutive artist with cropped dark hair and trademark chunky-black-frame glasses. “Tigers have this crazy cowlick pattern, lines are going in all directions. I’m trying to simplify it.”

She’s referring to the latest creation in her line of wildly whimsical masks, painstakingly crafted sculptures of multicolor crochet and other miscellany depicting beasts at once real and imagined, in all their weird, wacky glory.  

“My style is … very imaginative,” DelSignore offers, presenting snapshots of a few other Huck and Stuff commissioned works: a bunny, eerily similar to the apparition in Donnie Darko; a fox, frozen mid-cackle; and what one could easily mistake for the spawn of a unicorn and a nightmare. “I find them to be playful,” she quips. “A lot of people find them to be kind of dark and scary.”

It’s no surprise, then, that DelSignore found inspiration for the project last fall in a painting by friend Jessica Hess of a monster eating a lady. After completing a few custom orders and participating in a recycled-art show in Providence, R.I., she was nabbed by Hardware at MASS MoCA to create a series of creatures based upon the large-scale installations in the galleries. The results—a fuzzy purple bird with a wonky toucan beak, a dendrite-crested ebony construction called Amorphius Black, and a grimacing white stag pup meant to hail from the Tolkien-esque ivory paper forest of the museum’s Material Word exhibit—are available for purchase.

“I like the way they are in a room—they have a presence,” DelSignore says. (Indeed, each is a full-head, wire-frame structure that looks misleadingly heavy, but is anchored upon a construction helmet for easy wear.) “They’re not an impulse buy—they’re three hundred dollars, and that hardly represents the work that goes into them—but I love watching the way people react to them. It’s so much fun to put them on and run around.”

May this be the most fantastical Halloween, ever. [OCTOBER 2010]

THE GOODS

Huck and Stuff
At the Pittsfield Contemporary Gallery
305 North St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.822.4822

Hardware at MASS MoCA
87 Marshall St.
North Adams, Mass.
413.664.4481 ext. 8140