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1/7/2003

New Lawn

Jack the Pelican, New York

Contemporary Nature in a Subdivision World

Featured Artists:
Andrea Ackerman, Rick Albee, Laura Emrick, Susan Ingraham, Yoshio Itagaki, Jerry Kearns, Adela Liebowitz, Joan Linder, Suzanne Walters, Sheri Warshauer

The title of this exhibition references the upstanding citizen's pride and vanity in the unbroken, virginal perfection of an artificial green. And the American right to leisure.

The eight featured artists portray a fully domesticated, plastic landscape.
Their manicured and seamless surfaces are numb. These are musings on lives imagined in the absence of work, politics and critical thought. They are bemused, detached, delighted-and haunted with anxiety.

About the artists
In the politically active 80s, Jerry Kearns painted fierce collisions of manipulative popular rhetorics and iconographies. In his recent work, he has tucked his convictions under a taut new skin of bright, fresh Piero della Francesca sweetness. His posturing inhabitants are the mutant byproducts of the advertising industry. They are subtly trapped in the crossfire of identity brands.
-But they don't know it. Big-sky America has surrendered to the overweening fecundity of popular media.

Laura Emrick is the Mars Colonization artist. She has been preoccupied with the science and aesthetics of terraforming for 10 years. With fluorescent neon pinks and greens and biosphere crystal gardens, she turns imperial lust grrrl-pretty.
-Revisionist future? Or subtle satire of 21st century imperial America?

In a similar vein, the young Japanese artist Yoshio Itagaki recasts the moon as a site-seeker's paradise. In his Tourists on the Moon series of digital images, happy vacationers pose in front of the giant orb of earth hovering tenuously in the nothingness of space. One cannot help but feel a certain envy for those who have been there.

Susan Ingraham offers up 2 catwoman fabulous video studies. EsCarGo is a daydream departure from Godard's Breathless. -A flirty girl in Parisian café blows supersized pink bubblegum bubble. -bigger and bigger until poof! she is reborn as a giant sad sloth of a pink snail, munching leaves in the garden. Iguana conversely is a chick on the prowl toward self realization flick, which might could be subtitled, "A Fetish for Green."

Suzanne Walters paints frolicking Disney-esque fawns in the peak of their sexual innocence. They are bodies without a job, living in the perfect contentment of their own cuteness. Their Twilight Zone is a denuded theatrical space. A timeless biblical nowhere, outside of history and consequence. And the modeling of the figures in a High Baroque vernacular is impeccable.

Adela Liebowitz's black and white paintings are written in the manipulative conventions of the gothic, proto-slasher films of the 70s. They tell the tale of an intruder about to happen upon dark secrets buried in the privacy of a lonely house. Gazing at these creepy New England back roads at grey dusk, the viewer is positioned as a lurker on the verge of scaring herself to death. Privileged detachment is about to be quickly undone. -Makes one mindful, on the slow backward retreat, not to snap a twig.

Rick Albee's creature plants in unglazed porcelain are like primitive little lawn carnivores from a time long long ago, before nature cared to make a distinction between plant and beast. They are fossil-stiff and bone white, as if petrified and bleached from eons of harsh desert sun. And patterned with dazzling, Indus-valley complexity. Their orifices are mandibled, as if poised to devour, say, a potter's hand.

Sheri Warshauer brings a Warholian naïveté to bear on the showroom residences of important art collectors. Where pictures are sheltered from the critic's gaze. She paints each separate holding with relish, reducing it to a signature of itself. To create a game of Name that Artist that is apt to inspire social insecurity in even the most astute among the cognoscenti. -All in good fun.

Joan Linder's office landscapes dwell on the sleek beige beauty of xerox photocopy machines. They are cubicle fantasies of yonder rolling hills. Beautifully, lusciously painted. Bright and happy as a summer's day.

The hyperreality of Andrea Ackerman's Weeping Hemlock invites mouth-gaping wonder. She created the peculiar saturation, resonance and distortion of this digital image very simply, standing before the tree and inch by inch scanning it with her video camera; then, on her computer, stitching a seamless composite of each frame. At 10 x 23 feet, it is a proud surrogate for the real thing.

Jack the Pelican Presents is a new gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Opens: Wednesday, July 2, 7-9pm

Dates: July 2-August 3, 2003

Gallery hours: Friday-Monday, 12-6

Jack the Pelican Presents
Location: 487 Driggs Ave. between N. 9 and N. 10, Bedford stop on the L train Williamsburg
voice: 646-644-6756

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