Mary McCleary at Dallas Visual Art Center - Dallas - painting exhibition - Brief Article

In Mary McCleary's retelling of Jesus's parable of the prodigal son, the feast that celebrates the prodigal's return becomes a Texas-style family barbeque. Seventeen figures fill the 52-by-75-inch image. A couple dances as a man plays the fiddle. Women bring platters of fruit and pour lemonade. One young boy takes a forbidden sip of beer. The father, a middle-aged rancher with an ample belly, looks lovingly at his newly returned son, decked out for the occasion in a pink sequined cowboy shirt. The disconsolate elder son looks on from the background.

In addition to Prodigal Son (1996), this 15-year survey of McCleary's work included her treatments of such stories as The Good Samaritan (1995), Cain and Abel and Abraham and Isaac (both 1989), and Lazarus the Beggar (1995). Modern-dress versions of Bible stories are not what one expects to find in contemporary art exhibitions, and McCleary ups the "unlikeliness quotient" of her material by transforming what begin as paintings on paper into painstaking collages involving thousands of tiny components. She favors cut and colored paper but also incorporates beads, bottle caps, lengths of cord, plastic toys and, in every work from 1987 on, a system of evenly distributed plastic google eyes. Even while being floored by the sophistication of her technique and her ability to use collage for carefully rendered settings and realistic portraiture, I kept thinking that the work had much in common with the eccentric craft projects you find in what, in recent memory, was still referred to as "The Women's Building" at the Texas State Fair. But the elaborateness of McCleary's collage is a complementary and indispensable element of her narrative images. It draws you in, encouraging you to look closely so as not to miss a single detail.

Each of these stories has been fully and freshly reimagined, free of irony and never beholden to art-historical references. Such Old Testament characters as Potiphar's wife and David and Bathsheba translate with ease into contemporary affluent suburbanites. In I Fled Him Down the Days and Down the Nights (2000), Edward Thomas's "The Hound of God"--that chestnut of Victorian religious verse--provides the text for a haunting picture of a couple mounting the stairs of their home. They've paused because they've heard something. It could be the dog or the cat, an intruder or God. A master storyteller, McCleary leaves all those possibilities tantalizingly open.

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