Terrain Gallery show ‘Body of Work’ puts tattoos in fine art spotlight

Visit just about any art museum, and they will almost surely have several rooms full of paintings from around the world and throughout history. Other rooms may feature sculptures or photographs, fiber arts or metal work.

Tattoos rarely, if ever, receive the same chance to be admired. The image may be on a person, not a canvas, but it doesn’t make the art less noteworthy or the artist less talented.

Christina Villagomez, founding artist of 5th Dimension Studios in Coeur d’Alene, and Sara Mortier, owner of La Mort Tattoo in Spokane, independently submitted show proposals to Terrain for its gallery that centered on, in part, seeing tattoos in a new light.

Villagomez and Mortier were paired together for the November exhibition and are co-presenting “Body of Work,” now open at the Terrain Gallery. The show runs through Nov. 29.

Villagomez grew up with a musician father and a photographer mother who instilled a love of the arts into their children. Villagomez started drawing when she was “knee-high to a grasshopper,” though in high school, she thought her creativity would lead her to work as a journalist.

“My mom kept telling me she always thought I was going to grow up to be a tattoo artist,” Villagomez said. “I thought that was so strange, because I didn’t really have any interest in it at the time.”

While working on her associate’s degree, Villagomez realized she wouldn’t have a lot of time to draw if she was a full-time journalist, so she put a pause on school so she could re-evaluate her next steps.

Around the same time, a local tattoo artist whose art Villagomez admired reached out and asked if she could use some of Villagomez’s art for flash tattoos. This opened her eyes to there being an interest in her work as tattoos but also the variety of tattoos being done.

“We had family friends that were tattoo artists, and I always saw it as a singular style,” she said. “Being able to see all these different styles of tattooing that have emerged in the last 20 years was so inspiring and so exciting. I really wanted to be a part of it, so I actually started my apprenticeship in my mid-20s.”

In other words, mother knows best.

Villagomez apprenticed under Jake Sifford at Black Matter Tattoo for two years. Over those two years, she experimented with a variety of styles but ultimately solidified the love she had for illustrated black work when she entered her apprenticeship.

Similar to Villagomez’s youthful interest in drawing, Mortier said she “came out of the womb drawing.” Unlike the support Villagomez received, many cautioned Mortier that she didn’t want to be a starving artist.

As a result, drawing remained a hobby for Mortier as she worked first as a special education teacher then as a manager of a research lab at the University of Washington. That hobby lead her to tattooing about six years ago when Mortier decided she wanted to give herself a tattoo.

Having never picked up a tattoo machine before, Mortier spent a year and a half studying tattoo theory, reading all the books and watching all the videos about tattooing she could, and taking online courses.

She then ordered a tattoo machine and practiced tattooing on oranges.

“Then I finally turned it on myself, and I was like ‘This is the most amazing thing. I love it so much,’” she said. “I loved this theory already. It was amazing, the science of it, the art of it. Human physiology mixed with all of that? Fantastic and so complex. I turned the machine on myself, and there was no going back. I was so in love with it.”

Mortier began tattooing friends and family before eventually opening a private studio for two years. She opened La Lune Tattoo Collective but has since returned to a private studio, La Mort Tattoo, after La Lune closed earlier this year.

Villagomez and Mortier independently submitted proposals for gallery shows, both of which involved sensory elements, like silicone forms and sculptural installations. Villagomez’s proposal wasn’t necessarily tattoo-related, but she loved the idea of adding sensory elements to tattoos.

On Villagomez’s side of the exhibit, she has displayed a number of examples of her flash tattoos. Many pieces are on paper, featuring animals and flowers, while others follow the curves of mannequin forms which have been turned into lamps.

“I love art nouveau and I love the idea of art being accessible on a daily basis in a practical way,” she said. “I wanted to make lamps, because I thought it was a fun way to make an object that’s useful in everyday life, but it’s still representative of tattooing and something that you can find in the gallery.”

On Mortier’s side, she takes viewers through a timeline of tattoos through history. The timeline starts with the simple lines found on Ötzi, the mummy of a man thought to have lived between 3350 BC and 3105 BC, which Mortier said are believed to have been medicinal in nature, aligning with joints that had degraded while he was alive.

It continues with Polynesian back tattoos, among other styles, and ends with a silicone rat and Kewpie doll, each with multiple tattoos, showing a more modern habit of getting tattoos of varying styles rather than just one.

“So much research from a thousand different sources to get a good sense of what each era looked like, although it was a little difficult because it really depends on which part of the world you were in, so I had to generalize …” Mortier said. “I chose references that I thought were the most representative. It took a lot of research to get a good, clean overview of all of it, and then from there I went and I snagged actual pieces that existed from the time to recreate.”

Before deciding on what they would present, Villagomez and Mortier spoke about their goals with the collaboration. They wanted the show to speak about objectification and permanence but also to put a proper spotlight on tattoos, showing them as belonging in the art world.

Mortier said there’s a history of division between what is considered fine art and what’s considered craft and folk art, with tattoos seen as straddling that line. They are also burdened with associations to criminals and the underground.

As such, people used to raise an eyebrow at you if you said you were a tattoo artist, Villagomez said, but it’s been embraced more and more over time.

“One thing I love about this show is the history of tattooing is really based in borrowing,” she said “A lot of American traditional artists back in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s would look at fine art. They would look at art on magazines or book covers, and they would borrow those designs and adapt them into tattoo designs, so it’s really fun to reverse that process and take our tattoo designs and present them as fine art.”