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Hilary Harkness at Bill Maynes - New York - Brief Article
Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Michael Amy
Hilary Harkness's first solo exhibition comprised five small to medium-sized oil-on-canvas paintings, executed on a miniature scale and packed with titillating detail. Her consistent subject is women who often fulfill roles traditionally reserved for men, such as serving on a submarine or in combat. Her depictive style is reminiscent of the so-called clear-line school of comic strips founded by Herge, the creator of Tintin. But Harkness's lithe, wonderfully attenuated yet buxom females revert to the proportions of that most American of inventions-Barbie--while at the same time transforming them. This artist is interested in themes of sex and violence, as is underscored by the hard-core titles of paintings such as Rearguard Action!, Unconditional Surrender and Taste of Salt. Appropriately she casts her actors in settings that are permeated with tints of blue steel.
In Rearguard Action! (2000), a cross section of a multichambered submarine, cropped on all four sides, is arranged parallel to the picture plane, thereby establishing a modernist grid near the surface of the painting. The vessel's compartments, some of which are deserted, include engine rooms, sleeping quarters, laundry facilities and dining areas. The women sailors wear the skimpiest shorts and tightest T-shirts, cut just beneath their breasts, as they conduct their chores, hang around or engage in more unusual practices. Thus, two nudes in a bathtub are being vigorously washed by another pair of women. In an adjacent "sick bay," a pair of women depart while two patients remain strapped to a bed and a third lies nude--her legs spread apart--and seemingly unconscious on an examination table. Here, Harkness simplifies both form and contrast, uses perspective and foreshortening to dramatic effect, conflates the commonplace and the bizarre, and relies on the framing structure of comic strips to organize her troubling narrative. The precious execution and intimate scale force an examination of the picture from close up, intensifying the viewer's role as a voyeur.
Two skimpily clad women sailors in Shore Leave (2001) carry a badly wounded companion on a stretcher into a dusky living area already occupied by two women in lingerie and a statuesque third in evening wear. Their bodies overlap in ways that connoisseurs of realism would find improper, for one woman's head appears to emerge from another's shoulder and hover mysteriously above a third woman's knee, while armwrestling women sailors in an adjacent room seem to reach with their interlocked hands for the breast of a woman located much closer to us. One is struck by the lack of sympathy or affect among the actors. Harkness's "popular" style might invite us to not take her stories too seriously, but their atmosphere of intrigue and debauchery is difficult to dismiss.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group
