Editorial: Reviews
"Strange Worlds/Altered Realities"
at Traywick Contemporary, Berkeley, California
Review by DeWitt Cheng
Karrie Hovey, ''Untitled,'' from the ''Ground Covering'' series, 2012, books, installation, size
varies.
Continuing through June 30, 2012
Fantasy has always comprised a large part of art history’s portfolio, even when the unrealities
it depicted — its heavens and hells — were presented as "gospel truth, eternal verities and
severities" (to quote P.G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster). If contemporary art is more honest
about its artificiality and fictiveness, its metamorphoses can be just as stunning: think of Penn
and Teller explaining in advance how magic tricks work — and then still blindsiding us silly.
“Strange Worlds/Altered Realities” features Linda Mieko Allen, Rachel Davis, Ken Fandell,
Karrie Hovey and Stas Orlovski. These are artists who hide nothing up their sleeves, which is
to say they are transparent in their use of materials and procedures, and thus anti-illusionistic
in the contemporary manner, but still fire our imaginations. Mundus vult decipi, the world
wants to be deceived, but nowadays, preferably, without tears and fears.
The three painters combine contemporary ideas about abstraction and process with hints of
older traditions. Allen’s three mixed-media “Parallax” paintings on aluminum panel are
predominantly abstract, frontally oriented planes of spattered paint crisscrossed by thin
horizontal and vertical lines. These function to stabilize and compartmentalize the gestural
chaos. They can also be seen as turbulent landscapes observed from lofty perches, calling to
mind panoramic battle paintings like Albrecht Altdorfer’s “Battle of Issus" (1529). The combat
here is between discordant visual elements (i.e., linear vs. painterly) rather than the massed
armies of ancient Greece and Persia. Another interpretation is geological or archaeological,
with the surface reading as a cross section that reveals ambiguous half buried and
fragmentary artifacts — culverts, pipes, piers, beams, joists — that could have once formed a
larger and unified system. Allen’s use of Surrealist decalcomania, the squishing of paint into
rivulet/branch patterns, recalls the vision of nature run amok in Max Ernst’s mesmerizing,
deliquescent landscapes of the 1940s. These complex, beautiful, playful works reflect today's
atmosphere of embattled struggle and even foreboding.
Davis explores myth and symbol in her lyrical watercolors, which depict motifs drawn from
Chinese art — dragons, pagodas, and pillar-like mountains — in symbolic situations or dramas.
In “Year of the Dragon,” four kites dance in the sky, this year’s horned, fanged astrological
symbol holding pride of place. In “Parallel Universe,” a modern skyscraper of reflective blue
glass panes seems to crumple an ancient pagoda; or is the sinuous pagoda actually climbing
the sheer glass cliff? In “Nail House,” a ramshackle building sits atop a little mountain between
two monolithic office buildings; the title refers to “stubborn nails,” the developers’ term for
homeowners who refuse to be dislodged by harassment or surrounding construction. Her “Hua
Shan” depicts Mount Hua, the Taoist Western Great Mountain, as a symbol of fecund nature, if
no longer the domicile of the gods.
Orlovski’s three “Head” monoprints combine the Orientalized nature imagery of previous work
— waves, vortices, rock, plants, rain and ripples — with the simplified heads that began to
appear recently. “Head with Wave,” “Head with Storm” and “Head with Whirlpools” feature
white silhouettes of bollard-like heads, the image repositories of, perhaps, nature-struck sages
and scholars retired from bureaucratic duties.
Fandell works witty variations on photographic conventions and photocollage in his digitally
altered color photographs. In “Horse Eye,” he has cloned the fur of the subject to form a
background plane, a pelt or wall from which the eye peers out calmly. What suggests a tangle
of fur snagged on barbed wire turns out to be superimposed foliage, shown from below, in
“Palm Drawing 6.” The uninterrupted blue sky of “Festiva” is interrupted only at the top, where
the roof of a white econobox coupe dangles inexplicably; is the car, a Ford Festiva
subcompact, suspended by a junkyard electromagnet prior to flattening, or is the picture
simply flipped? One photograph depicts a wooden floor from which a tiny plastic palm tree
sprouts.
Hovey subverts and exalts crafts tradition with her process-based work. An installation entitled
“. . . the Garden grows: Vine” covers two corner walls of the gallery with vines sporting scores
of handmade recycled-paper/plastic flowers. “Titled” is comprised of print publications folded
end-to-end into teardrop-section signatures which are joined radially to form cylindrical minitowers. Arrayed in groups, they resemble tiny cities; displayed with seeming casualness
perched on the gallery’s maple hardwood steps, or sidling next to a sofa, they make for
surprising encounters, like the walking stick, at the end of the film "Enchanted April,"
implanted in a Tuscan hillside, sprouting branches.
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