Science, sorrow and sea anenomes
Three mentalities merge at Flanders Contemporary Art
and the Angel of Mercy |
By Harvest Henderson
Dear God,
Please have mercy on me, a fool..."
Penned in haphazard script on loose-leaf paper, tucked beneath the edge of an envelope with a Santa Fe postmark, these are the words of anyone cognitive of their own weaknesses. But the paper is actually oil paint, the 29› stamp is a painstaking reproduction and the signature on the letter is that of the artist, Martin John Garhart, in whose painting this humble detail work appears.
Garhart is one of three artists exhibiting recent drawings, paintings, and etchings at Flanders Contemporary Art, located in the Wyman Building downtown. Anna Marie Pavlick and Minnesota native Steve Sorman are also showing.
| Martin Garhart, Anna Marie Pavlick and Steven Sorman. Through November 29. Flanders Contemporary Art. Free. 344-1700. |
Garhart's work is featured in the first of Flanders' two galleries. His 46" x 60" Red Whistle and the Angel of Mercy positions the above letter to God at the bottom of a midnight landscape, all of which is painted eerily over the shape of a large tombstone. An anonymous face floats toward the center of the tombstone, circled in a golden halo, and above it two indigo handprints reach upward for a red whistle dangling in a bouquet of yellow roses and purple ribbon. The tombstone and hands are cut into the surface of the piece, tempting viewers to place their own hands into the space created.
Garhart's work is spooky and immediately captivating, from his large paintings like Red Whistle to the series of delicate Rorschach-like landscapes, Place ##1 -- ##5, just inside the gallery door. Each Place is the size of an index card within a heavy wooden frame, and suggests but does not disclose the shape and temper of some mysterious land in a moody spray of graphite.
However, an excess of roses and playing cards almost endangers the subtlety of which Garhart is capable. While his reproduction of such easily recognizable three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional space is realistic enough to make the viewer lean in closer and squint (nope, that's not a piece of masking tape stuck carelessly on the edge of a painting; it's part of the piece) it risks becoming a gimmick. Fortunately, the gimmick doesn't quite outweigh the strength and complexity of the majority of Garhart's work -- from a garden trowel to a classic nude, in narratives and inner landscapes that are at once personal and universal.
In contrast, Pavlick's etchings and intaglio prints are fairly straightforward. Covering the back wall of the second gallery, her collection of 52 Personal Poems creates a curio cabinet effect. Each 7" x 4" etching is a representation of some detail of her life, from her family's traditional dinner table stories to her everyday stresses as a woman. Individually, the Poems are direct, simple statements: One Step Ahead of the Bugs illustrates her mother's housecleaning strategy, and Priorities is about that hard-to-maintain balance in modern day existence.
The Personal Poems are accurate and honest. What they seem to lack is the confidence of their creator; Pavlick accompanies the display with pages of unnecessary written explanations, a sort of Cliff's Notes tour of her psyche to make sure that viewers really "get it." This persistence in explaining herself puts a damper on viewer interpretation: "Wow, what a great commentary on temptation and female body image in a perfection-obsessed society ... oh, no, it says here that she just likes to eat scones in the morning."
The exhibit contains several other images by Pavlick, including an Ideal Mechanical Advantage Series that comically reveals her bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, but her strongest work is probably her series of global fables. These five large etchings in dark, vivid colors are depictions of ancient multicultural morality tales, with obvious implications and inspirations for living in the 20th century. Here, Pavlick's explanations assist the viewer in interpreting legends with which they not likely familiar. Especially noteworthy is Unanana's Journey, the story of a woman who went to great lengths to rescue her children from the belly of an irritated elephant. Pavlick describes Unanana as a woman who "was resourceful and determined and reached her goal." In her own artistic resourcefulness, Pavlick printed the image of the sated elephant and Unanana's struggle over a very modern-day resource: the stock market page of a newspaper.
Steven Sorman's paintings balance the exhibit with a definite departure from both Garhart's mystic narrative and Pavlick's quaint revelations. The brightly colored abstractions of line and color are multi-layered, and his forms echo those of shells, skeletal shapes and vegetation without directly putting any of those on the canvas. His titles are equally abstruse and intriguing: things like noun's plural, seethe then, and a day of obligation (fifteenth hour).
In the acrylic and gel medium piece known as, a butterfly seems to dance within a sea anemone, a woman's dress swings innocently around her hips and all the tiny moons of Jupiter orbit around a square of mottled flame ... without any of the above items actually surfacing in the painting.
On a smaller scale, Sorman presents a series of untitled "dated paintings" (which, of course, aren't individually dated). Each 10" x 8" painting, collected into an ensemble of several dozen, represents a single day between Feb. 2 and Oct. 25, 1996 -- Sorman's personal calendar of miniatures in a winter of abstraction.
Flanders' exhibit brings together three distinct
mentalities, with themes that range from basic physics to otherworldly
fantasies and domestic contentedness to unrecoverable loss.
Sorman's abstraction complements Pavlick's undeceiving simplicity
well, but be sure to spend some time in front of Garhart's They
Seldom Spoke of the Tearing, taking in the precise
shadow of an orange peel against a graphite sky.
