Jeanine Breaker at William Turner

Jeanine Breaker's recent pastel drawings are small, self-reflexive spectacles. Technical feats in themselves, they picture acts of skill, daring and physical finesse. In each panorama, Breaker presents a tiny figure or two performing a traditional circus act--juggling, walking on stilts or tightrope--within an expansive landscape. Each work, strongly horizontal, measures only 7 by 26 inches. The space represented, though, feels vast, as well as dense with emotions of risk and vulnerability.

In hoop snake, the odd and wondrous converge, as a body passes through hoops held just over the surface of a placid, salmon-pink sea. In dive the twine, a diver arches off a gallowslike platform toward a little bucket below, a spectacle as gasp-worthy as the landscape in which the act is set. The broad plain sliced by a silvery winding river calls to mind the Oxbow, the bulge in the Connecticut River made famous by Thomas Cole in his epic painting of 1836. Similarly, in screaming ostrich, Breaker silhouettes two aerialists against the warm dusk light reflected in terraced pools just like those of Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone. Natural wonders provide a backdrop for acts of human enterprise. Spectacle reinforces spectacle to felicitous effect.

The tiny performers, especially, transcend the literal and rise to the level of metaphor, suggesting conditions or predicaments within the realm of human experience. Breaker pushes the scenes further toward the emblematic by titling her drawings with obsolete phrases and colloquial expressions: fog-dog, blue fine of the dinkum oil, to chant the play. Falling somewhere between credible and fabulous, the titles--together with the definitions she provides for them--speak of exposed tricks, false miracles and clever illusions, practices of useful deceit as basic to art as to theater and the circus sideshow. Breaker's performers proceed without guile or irony, but with a self-possessed precision both bewildering and attractive. Their hard-won equilibrium, their mastery of a tenuous balance between the futile and the miraculous, is what makes for a good show. Breaker herself, so agile at her craft and so thoughtful in intent, achieves no less in these ravishing drawings.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group