In her powerful mixed-media painting Red Crosses, currently
on view in the Jack Robinson Gallery group exhibition “Code,” Sam Red
blurs the boundary between the conscious and unconscious and between
the sacred and the profane. Across the surface of the painting,
Christian crosses drip blood. A series of circles looks more like worn
tires than symbols of perfection or eternity. A strip of brocade
wallpaper points to the top of the painting where the charred facade
and the crumbling archways of a villa or cathedral bring to mind
antique pontiffs’ hats or the soiled outfits of Ku Klux Klanners. This
is what ideology looks like in the real world.
Red Crosses reads, in part, like Francis Bacon’s mix of
religiosity and rot. Instead of being sardonic, however, Red’s
aesthetic sensibilities register as insistence that we look at the
world not as we wish it to be but as it is.
Years of chemotherapy that successfully treated photographer Tawnee
Cowan’s leukemia prevent the artist from taking medication to alleviate
the pain caused by an automobile injury. Cowan is able to forget her
pain, temporarily, when she photographs the fierce beauty and courage
of men and woman fighting cancer.
With fists clenched and mouth wide-open, the figure in Enough
rages against his fate. Some of Cowan’s subjects, like the Nashville
artist depicted in Enough, are winning the battle against
cancer. Others, more gravely ill, may not live to see Cowan’s book,
Warriors in Wings, to be published by the Wings Cancer
Foundation next year.
In Trapped Within the Unknown, one of Cowan’s most complete
statements regarding the human condition, a mosaic of delicate lines
crisscrosses her otherwise flawless porcelain torso and maps out a
network of nerves along which her back pain radiates. The title of this
work, the blindfold that Cowan wears, and the horizontal timber that
backdrops her head remind us that the cross that Cowan (and each of us)
bears is existential as well as physical.
Jennifer Barnett Hensel’s Lasting Conversation
Some of Alex Paulus’ strongest paintings are stark, beautifully
drawn oil-and-graphite works with Bible verses for titles. Paintings
such as I Will Bring Locusts Into Your Country remind us of the
Old Testament emphasis on vengeance rather than compassion.
What looks like a high-tech pest exterminator is God’s instrument of
judgment in I Will Punish Your Country by Covering It With
Frogs. If piles of frogs are a barometer of God’s anger, we have
indeed aggravated the Almighty. Billions of frogs are going belly-up
worldwide, victims not of God’s wrath, however, but of pollution,
disease, and global warming. In an age of nuclear weapons, rapidly
depleting resources, and religious warfare, people as well as frogs
seem poised at the brink of destruction.
Paulus calls into question the ideologies of his time. Drawings of
studio lamps in Darkness suggest that the discerning eye of an
artist is enough to shed light on any matter — no blinding
visions, no celestial light required.
Jennifer Barnett Hensel takes contour drawing to the edge of chaos
— lines that loop into swarms of flies, a child blowing soap
bubbles, tentacles sprouting from biomorphs, blood corpusules floating
in a blue sea, and iron-rich earth morphing into rabbit ears and
phalluses.
Barnett Hensel’s call-and-responses between the animal, vegetable,
and mineral worlds suggest a universal consciousness. Her strongest
paintings look like visual equivalents for lines from Dylan Thomas:
“The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower … blasts the
roots of trees … drives the water through the rocks … drives my red
blood.”
