* Regina Hackett, Seattle PI * Fred Camper, Chicago Reader * New American Paintings
never fear, painting is here: 'the prom' and 'last days' crank up the wow factor
By REGINA HACKETT
P-I ART CRITIC
Some say the world will end in fire. In the art world, alarmists say paint. Even though Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight speaks for the savvy in claiming that a "lingering animus toward painting is so end-of-the-20th-century," fear of it continues to afflict many.
ART REVIEW
There's little evidence of that fear in Seattle this month, as painting dominates front-runner galleries, including Lawrimore Project's "The Prom: A Semi-Formal Survey of Semi-Formal Painting" and Greg Kucera's solo exhibit of Darren Waterston's "Last Days."
Curator Scott Lawrimore has never been shy in expressing his reservations about the medium, until now. Helping him to see the colored light on canvas, panel and clear plastic is Alex Ohge, who curated "The Prom" with an eye to the vagaries of current practice.
Tomory Dodge contributed two small oils. Little more than a hands-span each, they echo Howard Hodgkin but with a strong residue of a narrative core. Their power is electric. If Dodge had made them in San Francisco in the late '60s (before he was born), they would have given psychedelia's limp visuals a transfusion of vitality.
Gordon Terry is going for the wow effect of mind-blown flower power with acrylic pours peeled off glass and affixed to clear plastic. With balls of color hurtling through a space that is flat and yet cosmic in its allusions, he brings motion to his oceans.
The third member of this tune-in, turn-on, drop-out phantasmagoria is Robert Hardgrave, whose profusions seem to be growing with viral abandon. Hardgrave lives in Seattle. The paintings in this show are a giant step forward from earlier efforts.
Eric Sall's canvases are the painting equivalent of baggy monsters, but full of joy.
Like Sall, Tiffany Calvert sees no reason to limit herself. Her work blurs inside and out, still life and landscape, the decorative and dainty with a doomed flourish. Nobody but her would swipe a brown haze over a Delftware blue delicacy. And who else paints chandeliers in the wilderness? Things should fall apart, but instead, with jaunty insouciance, they cohere.
Yoon Lee dissects a painterly gesture without slowing it down. "Subatomic Verve" in acrylic on frosted Mylar looks mass produced from a distance, as if it were an easy swipe across the plate of a printing process. Up close, its true nature reveals itself. She painted it, tiny daub by daub, into a force field.
Nicholas Nyland fashions grids of semi-transparent color. Under them, chaos looms. Joseph Park's portrait of German painter Tim Eitel looks skinned alive. Under the skin, fractured planes hum with fluid energy.
"The Prom" is the second of the gallery's three-part exploration of paint. The less said about the November debut, the better. Crammed into the back gallery without any attention to visual affinities and disconnects, good painters saw their work misused. Part 2 more than makes up for the unintentional slight.
P-I art critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattlepi.com. Read her Art To Go blog at blog.seattlepi.com/art.
two-dimensional dioramas, the chicago reader
By FRED CAMPER
MARCH 24, 2006. SECTION 2, PAGE 24
View a pdf of the article. This will open in a separate window.
Tiffany Calvert, who's showing eight witty paintings at Lisa
Boyle, is fascinated by museum dioramas and other extravagantly artificial
interiors. During her first year of grad school at Rutgers her interest in
medically inspired images, which she'd been doing for years, was waning. When
a fellow student asked her what she really cared about, Calvert recalled her
"near obsession" with the dioramas at the Field Museum (she lived
here from 2000 to 2003) and at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York (she now lives in New Jersey). She's not the only artist to be fascinated
by such displays' illusions; Robert Smithson was too. "The trees were
cast one leaf at a time, and are incredibly detailed," Calvert says.
"There's a line of grass to disguise the beginning of the painted back
wall, which is usually curved. They have to pay a lot of attention to the
lighting to avoid casting shadows on the wall." Calvert wanted to bring
out the arranged and constructed nature of these interiors--the play between
flatness and depth, the way reconstructions of nature reflect a wish for conquest--by
further arranging them. She began photographing dioramas, replacing the backgrounds
in Photoshop, and painting from her digital composites. "It was a great
relief to be able to use any color I wanted, to have something a little bit
humorous in the work, and to put in things that I didn't have an explanation
for." In Untitled (Musk Ox), a large dark animal hovers in front of a
background mostly taken from a Gainsborough painting--but the red curtain
is from a Vermeer. These disjunctions are intended to open up the work: "While
I am critical of the 19th-century conquest, I wouldn't want to make art that's
dictatorial."
Calvert says she learned to "think critically" as an undergraduate
at Oberlin, where she was influenced by formalist painter John Pearson: "He
emphasized boiling down your topic to something very succinct. We were taught
to think about all the aspects of our work and their effect on the viewer,
including the medium you choose, and only to put in things that are carefully
considered." Teaching school for three one-month periods on the Navajo
reservation spurred her later interest in disjunction and displacement. "It
was the most affecting thing I did in college. There was so much to learn
about the reservation and the history and why the situation is what it is
now. The Navajo I knew were very good about living in two worlds. They would
go to church and then go to a sweat lodge--they had no problems folding the
Christianity they had been fed into their own beliefs. You would see a hogan
and a 7-Eleven." In her junior year the death of a beloved grandfather
changed her and her work, after she stayed the night with him in his hospital
room and was with him until he died the next day. "I started making a
body of work about medicine. I did DNA drawings and a series of paintings
of IV bags at different levels of abstraction." Her professors told her
this work was cold and analytical. "That was part of the point I was
making about medicine. But the work was very premeditated, and after seven
years I had begun to grow dissatisfied with it."
Her current work engages paradox, mixing not only flatness with depth but
obvious fakery with convincing illusion. Two of the paintings in this show
were inspired by England's Lost Houses, a book of archival photographs of
country homes that later burned or were demolished. Calvert's Untitled (Oulton) shows a room with an outrageous number of deer heads on display. "They're
oddly symmetrical," she says, "and mounted directly on the wall
rather than on plaques so the hair spreads out around the mounting, as if
live deer were sticking their heads through the wall." In Untitled (Drakelowe
Hall) she made the original room's curved ceiling--a trompe l'oeil depiction
of sky and trees--"more painterly" so that the "outdoors"
would look even more artificial. Though such rooms reminded Calvert of dioramas,
bringing the outdoors in, "I don't know exactly what I like about the
dioramas and these rooms. That's why I'm still painting them."
Tiffany Calvert
When: Through Sat 4/15
Where: Lisa Boyle, 1648 W. Kinzie
New American Paintings, Number 57
My work appears in the 2005 Mid-Atlantic issue of New
American Paintings and Untitled (Two Deer) was chosen for the cover (newamericanpaintings.com).
