Couples
#figurativeart #representationalart #paintings #drawings
After a year apart, it seemed like the most urgent theme to explore was connection, or re-connection. And the fundamental unit of connection is the couple. Not only from the perspective of romantic love, or of conceiving and caring for children, but as the simplest possible unit of contact between human beings: one together with another one. So this is a show of couples.
With so many people shut in, experiencing contact through electronic mediation, the territory of contact came to seem impossible: perhaps gauzy and beautiful and indistinct – perhaps a source of anxiety or revulsion – but always impossible. Not quite real.
In these works, the reality of the couple is the starting point, opening not onto a homogeneous vision of togetherness, but a cycle of stories of how relationships begin, develop, and end.
The drama of attraction, of the first flush of lust, of exploring the mystery of the other, make their appearances in Cheney Lansard’s noirish Untitled No. 1 and No. 2 and in Alexandra Manukyan’s voyeuristic Cradle.
The golden field of romance has its representatives, in Oceana Rain Stuart’s soaring Eternal Love and Evan Goldman’s chivalric Lover’s Embrace.
The comfort and rich textures of longtime mutual knowledge and understanding underlie many of the works: Aixa Oliveras’s wry, affectionate Reunion – Kimberly Dow’s flirtatious Unveiled – Ellen Star Lyon’s comically intimate Rose and Olive and What is Mine is Yours – Jenny Abraham’s elementally recognizable beach scene in Absorb the Sun.
Some of the artists depict the dramas of domestic existence – of negotiating ways to live together even when people find that they are not, after all, unified in their hopes and desires. Patrick Earl Hammie expresses this drama in the contorted poses of Nadir, Case, and Labor III. Sara Gallagher depicts distance within intimacy in Boundaries. Daggi Wallace implies so much more story than she shows in Whisper.
Other work describes alienation, the tapering of a couple toward its end. Adam Holzrichter invokes the opening of uncrossable psychic space in Two Distant. Michele Murtaugh creates a surreal image of mutual destructiveness in A Cautionary Tale. Kim Leutwyler’s Conscious Uncoupling portrays a couple who, for all the goodwill in the world, cannot continue together. And Nico Vrielink simply depicts the airless claustrophobia of being stuck with one another, even after the relationship has ended, in Rejected in Toscane.
But this group of work includes many pieces which sidestep or entirely ignore so linear a reading of the history of a couple. The intimacy is clear, but the relationship is not, in Victoria Selbach’s Golden Taras. Likewise Geoffrey Lawrence’s Orphans depicts two individuals of unclear but close relation. Nothing more about the couple in Hilary McCarthy’s wistful Dreamless can be made out than that one is male, and the other female. Manu Saluja portrays her brother twice in Seeing and Knowing; an anonymous finger reaches, mirrorlike, toward a hand in Nicole Alger’s Pointer. Two pieces slip the boundaries of the human race entirely – two birds strut together in Christy Stallop’s Duo, while two apples find companionship together in James Xavier Barbour’s Two of a Kind.
Installation of Manu Saluja's painting of her brother titled Seeing and Knowing.
Finally, Ricky Mujica shines a loving light on that most profound of couples, a couple only hours separate from existing as a single body – a mother with her newborn, in Birth of a flower. A mother and daughter’s journey.