Clare Torina, Matriarchy Series
L Ross Gallery’s annual show “Works on Paper” affords talented
newcomers and already accomplished artists an opportunity to play with
ideas and experiment with signature styles.
Chuck Johnson’s latest watercolors are brighter and more transparent
than his encaustics on panel and take us deeper into botanical worlds
that Johnson (an avid gardener) knows well. The iridescent insects,
burnt-sienna fronds, and opalescent-blue waters take us beyond polluted
rivers and depleted farmlands into still-teeming pools, still-fecund
tracts of earth.
Small ink-and-gouache portraits in Clare Torina’s Matriarchy
Series include a surly teenager, a blind child, a woman with
green-tinged skin eating a green ice cream cone, and a battered
middle-aged man. At the center of this challenged slice of humanity is
a large sleek dog, a healthy creature that adds a much-needed touch of
equanimity to Torina’s fierce, funny, and honest exploration of human
experience.
Bobby Spillman’s ink, gouache, and coffee paintings are
mesmerizingly detailed but never over-worked. Spillman keeps our eyes
moving across his pictures with flocks of birds that swoop in and out
of view and fly above the floods and whirlwinds that have roared
through earlier installments of this artist’s “Spillmanville
Series.”
Mountains of sweets are everywhere in Spillmanville. In Twin Cake
Towers, condos for the town’s fine-feathered citizens are layered
with irony as well as tiers of icing, strawberries, donuts, chocolate
cakes, and jelly rolls. Frosting coils like a serpent near the top of
the condo on the left. The penthouse is crowned with what looks like a
cherry bomb as well as a cherry. These touches of treachery, excess,
and explosives suggest that humankind, as well as Mother Nature, has
played a part in the imminent collapse of the condos that are about to
topple.
Carl E. Moore, American Economics
This show marks the return of Jeri Ledbetter, who has been
exhibiting in Santa Fe for the past five years. We can see the
influence of the Southwest in her new oil-and graphite works on paper.
We also see an artist moving toward pure abstraction. In Valensol
II, Ledbetter’s softly glowing, subtly modulated ochre-and-gray
color fields suggest sunlight’s reflections on sheer rock faces.
Ledbetter’s expressive, inventive linework evokes naked branches
struggling for life in an arid landscape. Somewhere between
representation and abstraction, Ledbetter’s elemental landscapes no
longer depict the forest or the trees but something closer to the
source of things.
Recent University of Memphis graduate Lea Alexander transforms
highly textured, silken, and transparent fabrics into images of weather
patterns, rolling black hills, and shifting sands. In her especially
evocative digital print August 20th, rays of light break through
a late summer rain pouring down the face of a mountain.
David Comstock’s sinister, sharply angled abstraction
Untitled looks, in part, like a mountain on the verge of an
avalanche or a hulking figure in cloak and top hat. The figure is
frayed in just the right places to also suggest a prehistoric creature
with fangs. Stay with this dark mass for a while, and it becomes a
compelling Rorschach that calls up any fears that need processing.
In Carl Moore’s serigraph American Economics, everything has
gone black and gray except for the searingly red figure that floats in
a pitch-black void above the American flag. A steel spike, pointed
toward the figure’s buttocks, suggests the man is about to be skewered,
broiled, and served up rare. The same startlingly red figure has been
stabbed in the heart in Pursuit of Happiness. In
Heartland, he floats helplessly above the sharply pitched roof
of his Midwestern home. Scene after scene of economic freefall grabs
our attention and makes us squirm. With some of the most sardonic,
beautiful, and terrifying artworks we’ve seen this year, Moore incites
us not to riot but to get off our collective asses and find a way out
of our financial and emotional morass.
