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Amy Gartrell at Daniel Reich
Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Leigh Anne Miller
The works in "Hot Hands Cold Heart," Amy Gartrell's solo show, express a lingering nostalgia for the awkward relationships of adolescence, as if each work were inspired by a page torn from a recently unearthed middleschool diary. Gartrell earned a BFA from Cooper Union in 1996 and has shown frequently in New York, often exhibiting word-based drawings in a fluorescent palette, similar to much of the work shown at Reich. The main body of the show consisted of ink-on-paper drawings designed, in both color and style, to have a 1960s psychedelic feel (all works 2005).
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The most appealing of these was a series of three "subliminal mirror" drawings. Surrounded by a wide border of trippy geometric patterns and fronted with a slightly reflective piece of glass, each seemingly blank central area acted as a makeshift mirror. It was easy to miss the hidden messages--Stop Lying About Everything (27 1/2 by 20 inches) and I did not want to go to their stupid party anyway (30 by 20 1/2 inches)--faintly outlined on the dark paper behind each sheet of glass. You could almost hear a frustrated teenager screaming these defiant phrases before slamming her bedroom door.
Text functioned very differently in another series of works on colored paper. On close examination, one saw that tightly scrawled words and phrases had been used to build up areas of shadow, while contrasting spaces were left empty to define a variety of figural scenes. This technique was particularly effective in Mom & Regis (Be careful what you wish for; sometimes wishes do come true), a half-length portrait of two figures that appear to be based on an old family snapshot image drawn (with words) on a rectangular, pink-stained paper placemat. Gartrell applies the same text-based style in a 75-by-50-inch untitled acrylic-on-canvas-on-panel piece, the largest work in the show's main room. A crying child stands by a mound of rocks in front of a towering cross, backed by a sky filled with neon pink, orange and blue clouds. His body and the folds of his clothes are defined by the phrase, "I will face my fear I will permit it to pass over me and through me ..." repeated over and over like a self-help mantra.
The most ambitious piece in the show, despite an unclear connection to the overall theme of adolescent angst, was a macabre leafless black tree smoothly painted on the inside of the gallery's street-facing window. Don't Hang All Your Hopes on Me had real ornaments inlaid with various miniatures, keys, locks of hair, etc.--hanging from each branch by loops of delicate black lace ribbon. On the morning that I visited, the sun shone through the glass charms, casting tiny rainbows on the concrete floor.
In the gallery's back room, an 8-by-8-foot colorful felt banner hung from the ceiling, looking like a crafty version of a 1960s Wes Wilson concert poster. In the middle is the appliqued image of a girl, also in felt: a combination of a flower child and Wonder Woman. Swirling letters above and below proclaim, "I Am Fairly Certain It Will Be Okay." And despite all of this teenage-inspired confusion and defiance, Gartrell is most likely entirely right.
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