This exhibition, installed with a sensitive eye for the strengths  of each artist, is on view at the Oceanside Museum of Art . Credit  curators Debby and Larry Kline - collaborating artists as well as husband and wife - with seeing how three seemingly disparate figures could be brought together to create  a cogent show. And credit the Klines  and the museum with giving gifted artists - all local, meaning from San Diego an Tijuana - a generous presentation of their work.
Boccaccio depicts angels, human scale ones.  They have none of Watt's jaunty comic sensibility, but they do display an equal measure of visual drama.  done in shattered glass and wood, they flank a doorway.  One pair functions as sentries to a room that contains a jarring sight - a life size bed housing a giant heart covered with a skin of glass.  The heart is in two pieces, lying on its side and the jagged edge of each side is gilded.  There are butterflies in relief on the headboard.
This work. "Sueňos Rebeldes (Rebellious Dreams)," is like a vivid metaphor of a broken heart, made literal.  It's also clear that Boccaccio means  for us to connect this stunning sight with other works in the show, many of which contain pictures of a strikingly pretty little girl.

 

The sculptural heart, which is  huge and split in two, rests on shattered glass within a bed frame in Poupee Boccaccio's installation, Sueňos Rebeldes (Rebellious Dreams)." Gene Ogami

She is, as the exhibition catalog tells us, Boccaccio's sister, Catherine Boccaccio, 15 years older than Poupee, always appears in this youthful state within the artist's smaller - scale reliquaries and boxes. Catherine appears frozen in time, doubly so encased behind glass. Such work can be seen as a set of memorials to childhood, elegies for innocence lost.  The artist's sister is in costume, dressed like a littler angel, a winged archer or a ballerina.
These portraits are archetypal.  They also hint a rebirth, in their display of scarabs - an ancient icon of regeneration - as a recurring element.  And, the autobiographical dimension of these works gives them added poignancy.
Boccaccio's sister is a clinical schizophrenic, unable to care for herself as an adult.  "I never knew her in a normal way," the artist recalled in a 1999 interview.
These works are surely therapeutic for the artist, but they are much more than that.  In Boccaccio's exacting use of materials and in her eye for symbol and arresting image, she gives common symbols like angels and hearts a fresh life.  Hers is a picture of pain and its transcendence.