Mental disorders personified

There’s this lady who can’t stop buying stuff from QVC. People say her roommate is a kleptomaniac. Have you heard the one about the plastic surgery addict whose best friend thinks she’s a clone? What about the man who took care of the mummy of his dead aunt for years on end? And then there’s the gentleman who swears that God speaks through him. …

We celebrate and vilify the subjects of weird news, shocking crime stories and "exposes" of marginalized populations and cultural practices. The ink illustrations in Dana Paresa’s "Uncontrollable Urge" offer a means to contemplate this carnivalesque reality and invite viewers to think about how they may have already internalized it.

In dealing with the estranged and isolated, Paresa’s work joins Toulouse Lautrec’s prostitutes, cartoonist R. Crumb’s "losers" and untouchables, graffiti’s cracked-out characters, the music of Devo, the films of David Lynch and John Waters, and the documentary practices of hospitals, museums and prisons.

It is a challenge for artists to represent "freaks" and outliers without resorting to sensationalism. Paresa skirts the bulk of the risk by creating a cast of characters that represent real categories of mental illness. In some cases she has drawn portraits of those who have these disorders, and in others she has sampled celebrities (can you spot Bill Cosby?) to stand in for them.

Her mostly black-and-white portraits and borderline allegorical scenes have a clinical undertone, mitigated by a punk aesthetic that loosens her lines and fearlessly plays with exaggeration and imperfection. For Paresa the body is a fluid thing: Limbs taper off like roots, expressions melt and gazes charged with fear, anxiety and hot internal joy act as center points for concentric forms that represent the energies of these manias, delusions, syndromes and compulsions.

The strongest examples unite two disorders that each complement, feed or amplify the other. One is "Capgras Delusion + Dorian Gray Syndrome." Those with Capgras have neurological problems with facial recognition and believe an "impostor" has replaced someone who is close to them. Dorian Gray syndrome (based on the fictional character whose portrait ages in his stead) is characterized by an obsession with youth expressed through the frequent use of plastic surgery.

The scene of a couple is poignant and vaguely disturbing even without knowing that the man has Capgras delusion and is probably experiencing terrible anxiety. The strange way he holds the woman’s head becomes a gesture of profound doubt, enhanced by the contrast between the single tear running down his cheek and the apathy conveyed by her taut features, exaggerated lips and unnatural orange tan.

This is a tragic scene that plays out in various other iterations, including "Sadism + Erotic Autoasphyxiation" (the sadist is out-of- frame), "Hoarder + Klepto" and "Narcissistic Personality Disorder + Cotard Delusion" (belief that oneself is dead or does not exist).

But tragedy can be enlightening. What could have been a series of jokes is actually a utopian vision of a world where everyone finds his perfect match.

What about the solo portraits? Is the woman with autonomous sensory meridian response (scalp-focused pleasure) or the kleptomaniacal lady (dig the urgency indicators radiating from the steak!) suffering? No.

Where a photograph or more realistic representation might have been exploitative, Paresa’s brush-and-line work gives these characters a great deal of energy, albeit of a decidedly dark kind represented by expanses of black ink.

This is Paresa’s second show at ii Gallery in Kakaako. Compared with her first, which featured cartoon-style interpretations of marginalized town folk who populate the light-industrial neighborhood, "Uncontrollable Urge" demonstrates significant growth.

Paresa’s generation has unprecedented access to the edges, caverns and darker corners of contemporary culture, often from a very young age.

She has come back from safari with a coherent conceptual foundation, upon which she is developing an aesthetic that wrestles with the myriad ways people systematically control and negotiate the definition of "normal."

And what is "normal"? It’s whatever "those people" aren’t, and you know who "they" are — don’t you?