Inside the Studio

by Diane Daly

Artist: Colleena Hake
Media: Performance Art and Installations, including the Cardelabra
Studio Location: Her residence in Sam Hughes Neighborhood
Venue: The All Souls Procession and various Downtown events

f ever there were a time to ride in the death seat of Colleena Hake’s Cardelabra, it is in November.

The Cardelabra is what Colleena calls “a wishing shrine on wheels”. For most of the year it’s just a Gold 1977 Grand Prix festooned with blessings and baubles from 99-cent stores and thrift shops. But now Cardelabra’s hour is approaching, so hurry up and get in! Open the creaky passenger-side door and after you enter, give it a stubborn slam. You’ll hear a sigh from belabored brown upholstery as you sit, and then no other sound but the slowly cracking plastic, and ticking from a plastic clock-replica of a Muslim mosque on the dashboard.

Enjoy the quiet until the clock strikes the hour, and the tinny little chimes tell you it’s time for prayer. Then, pray you should! For on November 4th, the Cardelabra is due to drip wax alongside the raucous music of the All Souls Procession at finale site, and that 1977 engine may need your prayers to make it down Broadway. (Note that it won’t be moving during the Procession or finale festivities; motorized vehicles are not allowed.)

In case you don’t know, “death seat” is slang for the front passenger’s seat, so named for the high likelihood that its occupant will be crushed, should a car wreck occur. Colleena is a performance artist (she goes by first name only) with a flair for wordplay, so the death seat door of the Cardelabra is naturally where she honors the dead. There you find photos of her late grandmother, of an ex-boyfriend who passed away, of the deceased mother of a friend, and of Jeff Thomas, one of Tucson’s more notorious dead artists.

What sets Colleena’s enshrining style apart from the many others you’ll see on the Day of the Dead this year is the work—and the substance—she puts into preserving her memorabilia. The photos on the death seat door of her Cardelabra are suspended in polyurethane, as are the Mexican lottery cards on the hood, the image of Hindi God-as-Elephant Ganesh on the trunk, and many charms elsewhere on the body of the car. The thick, clear plastic coatings on these objects simultaneously convey artifice and peacefulness, the toxic and the immortal.

As a performance artist, Colleena revels in just such combinations of opposing sensations. She creates characters and tableau vivant, or living sculptures, that combine culturally familiar titillations and comforts with discomforting taboos. In her most well-known performance, in 2005 she recreated the 1940s publicity photo of a woman in a cactus bikini, at the Fools’ Hollow event, though Colleena’s cacti were more revealing and painfully real. At last month’s Fools’ Hollow at the downtown library, she and two other performers played a sitcom-style family of bombs, ready—but reluctant—to explode. They showed a “family photo album” of historically destructive family members and made jokes and puns about setting off bombs, or failing to, in the middle of a public festival. (Colleena was the Suicide Bombshell with dynamite strapped to her bust. Her line: “I was going to do a suicide bombing but I decided to blow it off. I’d rather be here drinking Molotov cocktails than offing myself.”)

Colleena describes the Molotov Cocktail Party performance from Fools’ Hollow as “subversive guerrilla theatre.” While it got its share of laughs, it is part of a serious performance art tradition to put on center stage whatever topic you aren’t publicly permitted to discuss; in this case, terrorism at a crowded public event. The thinking behind such performance is that removing these topics from public discourse lends the power of the unknown to those who perpetrate violence. Campy dialogue about taboos like terrorism, on the other hand, can make it seem foolish, and easier to understand. Colleena earned her Master’s in Performance Art from Prescott College in 2003 and studied under legendary performance artist Alex Hay, whose performances were considered among the first of this type of theater.

Perhaps the most subversive of Colleena’s performance tactics is one that never changes: she is deaf. (Note that she does use that term, rather than “hearing impaired”.) She doesn’t use sign language frequently; instead she communicates through speech combined with such adept lip-reading that it’s easy to forget she can’t hear you. Most of her audiences are not accustomed to hearing the range of sounds in deaf vocalization, and to baffle them more, Colleena doesn’t just speak onstage. She recites poetry, and sings, while flaunting herself in all manner of skimpy costuming, from candy bar wrappers to candle wax. People expect the hearing-impaired to be shy and silent; she is outspoken and unabashedly sexy.

Few of Colleena’s spectators would guess that she was brought up Catholic and still calls herself a non-practicing Catholic. However, her instinct to preserve and start new lives for old objects stems from these beliefs. “I had my last rites at 2 years old,” she says. “I had spinal meningitis as a baby. They thought I was going to die.” She smiles as she adds, “Now I’m basically living on bonus time. And I have a place reserved in Heaven.” At night her Cardelabra looks like a heaven for discarded objects and faded memories, topped with hundreds of candles and glow sticks, its plastic sheen eerily aglow.

Colleena’s Cardelabra will be parked at the Franklin Street loading docks—final site of the All Souls Procession—on the night of November 4th. Colleena encourages people to light her candles or place their own on the Cardelabra altar.