I am preparing a piece on the Clare Leighton show currently up at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. If my Memphis peeps can spare some time, they should go and see this work. More to come!

Tim Crowder at David Lusk Gallery

When I was young there was a certain children's book about dinosaurs that I treasured for its ability to take me to an alien place. The illustrations featured moody blue skies and murky green plant growth, and the pictures would never fail to transport me to this strange land, even if I was an unwilling traveller. I knew it was a dangerous place. The illustrations had an atmospheric quality that deepened their mystery and the sense that you were in an alien world ruled by animals, a place you did not belong. This memory came back to me as I looked at Tim Crowder's exhibition at David Lusk Gallery. The paintings depict commonplace animals in a shorn, verdantly lush world, and are done in a style reminiscent of old 1960's animal book illustrations. It is a lonely place devoid of people. The exhibition features paintings on paper with oils on black enamel. Each piece is well presented in hand-built frames. ( The open frames are inventive solutions to the cost of framing and work really well, better than the pieces in glass, which do less to show off the unpainted edges of the paper.) The animals displayed in Crowder's work betray an uncomfortable awareness of their situation and the viewer. The animals are deftly and skillfully rendered, and occupy a gloomy, atmospheric place of green pasture land over topped by troubled skies. The skies add to the mystery of the work because they bloom into nebulous cloud forms that darken and tower over the horizons. The animals occupy the foreground in most of the works, some staring at the viewer, all of them in relation to some man-made element.

Part of the mystery of the work comes from Crowder's use of text, ambiguous phrases which are sewn into the upper left or right hand portions of the pieces. The phrases sit askew to the implied narrative of the animals in the paintings, and seem to serve both as title and foil for the artist's intent. This most often suggests that language and reality are at cross purposes. This device creates a kind of dissonance that disallows the viewer the comfort that the cuteness factor with the critters can arouse. But this masks a desire to be taken seriously, I think, and it is used in all of the paintings. At times, I found it to be a little tiresome since it served to balance all of the compositions in the same way. But most importantly, it identifies the art as more conceptual in its leanings.

The show is titled "Building a Proper Wall", and walls are featured in nearly all of the works, whether as ruins, stages, or steps. There are other man-made structures in some of the paintings as well, a house, arks, and towers of babel. All of these have an intrusive quality in the landscapes. This sense is heightened in the painting "Playful Nature" where a giant shrub in the shape of a rabbit leans menacingly over the brick house in the center of the composition. The tower of babel suggests a failure of language to correctly gauge the sense of the world. This idea is especially keen in the painting "Sensible Improvements", where the tower has been playfully substituted with the trunk of a tree. Four different birds occupy four branches that move up the trunk , and the topmost bird utters one white, blank speech balloon. The ark suggests human selfishness and self-serving behaviors acting in conflict with the natural world. The ark also hints at disaster, and the sense that nature blithely waits to resume its work after humans have done with it, without God's covenant as symbolized by the rainbow in the Genesis story. The animals themselves are at the mercy of these chaotic forces in some of the works, with this chaos represented by falling red circles in two very dark paintings. (Those of you who have read Delillo's "White Noise" will be reminded of the airborne toxic event that is the backdrop of the novel.) Whether depicting the threat of disease or the limits of biology in terms of survival, these red circles are the most acute representation of ill omens in all of the paintings.

Many of the animals in these paintings brought to my mind Edward Hicks' painting "The Peaceable Kingdom", but in Crowder's work spiritual communion has been replaced by isolating dread and foreboding. No one has any useful answers. I love Crowder's recognition that behind animal consciousness is the symbol of something unknowable and chaotic, something akin to death. Crowder knows that when we are in the animal world we are at the limit of our consciousness and in deep water. Thus the walls in many of the paintings seem to represent walls put up to shore up the threat to our own psyche. What is a house if not a structure to keep out the chaos of the world? What is a wall if not a boundary line marking what can be known? In many of the works a distrust of people and language is evident, and the dread that is hinted at with the clouds in the backgrounds serves to give the work its quiet sense of unease. In one of the paintings a cow is stepping through the broken place of a wall and looking back over its shoulder at the viewer while a yellow ballooon floats in the sky above, taken away on the breeze. Has there been a catastrope? Have we interrupted the cow at some work? Is the cow makng some kind of pronouncement about culture, or is it just being a cow? At times the artist's coyness in explicitly stating a narrative seems more like a screen, and works not as well when there are fewer elements in the composition to drive it. (This is evident in the painting of the snowman and another one of a single deer.) There is a kind of fill in the blank that Crowder uses against the viewer and the viewer's anthropomorphizing tendencies. We can't help but to put a human face on these scenes, and Crowder reinforces that tendency with his text and empty speech balloons.

Crowder's use of thread in several pieces is delightfully inventive, especially in the painting "Transmit Receive". A radio tower of red and white radiating orange lines is rendered in thread, which jars with the juicy greens, greys, blues, blacks, and browns in the oils of his Americana-like landscape. He plays with scale in this work in an inventive way, balancing the shrinking of the radio tower with the unrealistic enlargement of the bird's nest to the right of it (it towers atop the tree...get it?) In another piece Crowder uses loops of thread for bees and the eye immediately sees them as such. It's a brilliant touch and works wonderfully well. It's one of the most striking pieces in the show.

Note should be made here of the sculptures, which unfortunately seem incidental to the exhibition as a whole. The sculptures carry many of the same ideas explored in the paintings, notably the story of the flood. However, he plays with scale in a way that makes the work tend toward self-deprecation, presenting everything in the same size as their depictions in the paintings. There is a more playful quality to the sculptures (the shrub rabbit with the root coming out of its ass is wickedly funny), but they lack the sense of foreboding that makes the paintings so arresting. The exhibition would have been stronger without them. Not all of the paintings hit the mark either. The painting "Sacrifice" ends up being clumsy because of the stiffness of the rabbit's ears, but the way the head stares at the viewer in sad accusation is troubling in its emotional intensity. (You get the sense that Crowder is a kind person, and getting an actual severed rabbit's head to work from would have been against the artist's nature. He can bare witness to inexplicable human cruelty in his paintings, but to use it in the service of art makes him complicit in that cruelty.) The main criticism I had with Crowder's paintings was the similarity of values across all the compositions. Because Crowder uses black as a ground, the values and colors in all of the paintings have a very similar range. The skies are all rendered in the same murky greys or greens. Since the skies and landscapes are very similar across all of the paintings, collectively not all of the paintings stand apart from one another and depend on their proximity to the other works to sustain interest. However, individually, the cloud charged backgrounds in many of the works fairly sizzle in a misty, gloaming light that threatens to engulf everything. In one sense, I felt this was a missed opportunity on Crowder's part, because the skies have a suggestion of light which is not entirely echoed in the depiction of light on the animals or landscapes. I felt perhaps if he relied less on the text as a conceptual element to anchor the compositions, the paintings could present more of that total pictorial mystery that is the world presented to the human eye, naked, quiet, disconcerting, sublime, and chaotic. Ultimately, this is the mystery that Crowder draws us into. It is a great show and should not be missed.

Tim Crowder-"Building a Proper Wall"
David Lusk Gallery
4540 Poplar Ave
Memphis TN 38117

http://www.davidluskgallery.com/exhibitions/2010.07/crowder/index.html

Thanks to Tim Crowder for kindly allowing me to use his images.