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6/7/2007

Marion Lane

BLK/MRKT Gallery, Culver City

Chasing the Rabbit

Holding true to her project pitting abstract illusion and harmony versus chaos, Lane makes clear in her artist's statement that nothing is what it seems, “I think of these paintings as TV images, abstracted frame by frame. The phrase “chasing the rabbit” is a kind of linguistic Rorschach test—suggesting Alice in Wonderland; down the rabbit hole; drugs; revolution. For me, though, this work is specifically about television. Image drives us into the future…and as we chase down the best image experience possible we are lulled into buying everything from talking soap bubbles, to war in Iraq...”

Lane’s fresh and innovative approach to not only the forms but the actions of abstract painting as it is commonly understood challenge fundamental assumptions about how fine art functions in today’s high-impact, high-speed and high-density culture. Though primarily non-representational and unapologetically beautiful, her images flirt with figuration as they contend with an opposing set of visual and aesthetic cues. Even as her seductively rounded botanical shapes reference fungal, floral and weedy growths and the occasional avian life-form, and her larger amorphous shapes directly relate to landscape spaces and individual terrestrial elements like rocks and ridges, by executing these in flamboyantly non-natural colors and preternaturally shiny textures, she ultimately leaves no room for naturalism in their ultimate interpretation.

She assembles rather than designs her compositions; most of the process itself involves pouring and dragging and pooling acrylic pigments into a compendium of individual appliqués which are then choreographed into aggregate clusters according to what Lane perceives as their natural (there’s that word again) orders. Because she doesn’t execute her final forms in brushed wet paint but rather using time and gravity, the surfaces of these individual elements remain pristine and the contours crisp—in contrast to the dense pockets of swirling, mottled detail and often kaleidoscopic intricacies within the contours of many of the shapes themselves. The resulting juxtapositions are unexpectedly comfortable, both aspiring to and eschewing ideas about organic growth, like a symphonic dissonance, or saltwater taffy.

In fact, despite her affection for intensely lyrical magic traditions like Japanese screen painting and fairy tale illustration, not to mention the complicated seduction of pioneering abstractionists like Bridget Riley, as her own writing asserts Lane insists that her paintings are about television rather than either nature or art history, and she makes a good case. Both drawn to and repulsed by television’s ability to deliver an unprecedented amount of irresistible information that is at best irrelevant and at worst manipulative and dangerous, Lane resolutely pursues the machinations by which falsehoods are delivered directly to the mind hidden inside the Trojan Horses of visual pleasure, replicating the process to deploy beauty instead.

Opening Reception: Saturday, July 7, 7-10pm

BLK/MRKT Gallery
6009 Washington Blvd. - Culver City
Free admission

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