Amy Cutler at Miller Block - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Art in America, Dec, 2000 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

BOSTON

Amy Curler's small, vivid, narrative paintings on wood panels seem to illustrate ordinary things transformed by the minds of imaginative children. The work 6 1/2 Pigs in a Barn (2000) is an ambiguous scene of six pink pigs painted on a 14 1/2-by-26-inch panel that is cut into a barnlike shape. Two of the pigs stand upright on their back legs. Another is escaping from a fiery furnace. The fractional pig (just a head displayed on a shelf) evidently didn't make it. The pigs look sweet and vulnerable, rather like chubby naked children unaware of an ominous situation.

Using mostly casein and flashe with touches of metallic leaf, Cutler does more drawing than painting. Her detailed works are precisely and delicately rendered in a colorful, flat style worthy of high-quality children's picture books. The roles of animals and humans are often exchanged or meshed: elephants and horses occupy house interiors, and people engage in odd activities alongside birds, pigs and sheep. Images frequently recur. An apron-clad woman kneeling over a full bathtub shows up in Lukewarm (2000) and also in a Rube Goldbergesque diagram of household plumbing, as well as in Organization (1999); the last is a busy scene of tubs and tanks outside a burning house from which people and animals are escaping down slides and ladders (inspired by the board game Chutes and Ladders).

Fire and water, in fact, instigate a lot of the action. Voyagers (2000) is a 30-by-26 1/2-inch work painted on a house-shaped panel in a cutaway view, like a doll-house interior. Sweetly decorated with old-fashioned furniture, the house is beset by flood and fire. Both humans and animals are fully rendered and painted in, but also presented as ghostly washed outlines. In one room, children blissfully skip rope, ignoring the water-filled rooms upstairs and the burning attic. Amid the flames, two girls hold desperately to the reins of a horse that's plunging through a break in the floor. Two levels below, pigs are inexplicably hung by harnesses from the ceiling above two children playing in tubs of water. This strange, dreamlike chaos is checked by Cutler's blase players as well as by her carefully controlled line, engaging colors and pervasive atmosphere of innocence and nostalgia. In an artist's statement, Cutler writes that, these scenes are like snapshots from untold portions of familiar folktales, a day or so after the mythic adventures took place. But if snapshots could capture the anxiety-filled dreams of real people, they might look a lot like this.