Jane Irish at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Art in America, Sept, 2003 by Miriam Seidel

Jane Irish, given the opportunity to show in the Pennsylvania Academy's Morris Gallery, juxtaposed her own paintings and sculptural reliefs with works from the Academy's collection to create a single large installation, which she called History Lesson. Including images of conspicuous wealth and urban poverty drawn from photo documentation of performance-based art and 1960s street protests, the work set up an array of associations and crosslinkages that added a hefty conceptual punch to what was already a high-energy visual display.

Irish, who came of age with the appropriationist generation of the '80s, has always been interested in architecture as a carrier of cultural meaning. Here, she grounded her piece in the uneasy contrast between the Academy's Victorian-Gothic building and the downscale neighborhood surrounding it. On the longest gallery wall, Irish set four of her relief panels, which echoed similar panels depicting famous artists on the Academy's facade, over an enlarged version of a sign for a check-cashing store located just across the street. Her reliefs, representing scenes from performance works by Marcel Broodthaers, Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci and Terry Fox, carried imagery that actually resonated with the humble store sign: a woman shown standing on a sidewalk, for example, derived from a work by Piper, while a homeless man asleep in a basement originated with Fox. Two other gallery walls offered dense patchworks of light-hued paintings by Irish, alongside darker works scavenged from the Academy's collection. A Reginald Marsh image of a 1930s union protest, for example, was surrounded by several paintings by Irish that depicted moments from 1960s-era protests.

Along the fourth wall, a faux-collage triptych reached a crescendo of clashing imagery. A painting depicting the rococo boudoir of art collector Mrs. Henry Clay Frick, flanked by snapshot-style paintings of Marie Savio, Joan Baez and other heroicized protesters, covered the top panels, while below a painted trompe-I'oeil arrangement of documents from the '60s--posters, cartoons, slogans--was set against a lushly painted floral molding that matched the decor of Mrs. Frick's room.

In passages like these, Irish made clear her own attraction to the abundant visual pleasures that accompany great wealth. Pointing out the unexpected similarity of psychedelic poster lettering to that of lovely floral molding, for instance, helped to keep the moral ambience in the gallery from settling into formulas (good-guy protesters vs. bad-guy robber barons). And the style and palette of Irish's paintings (in gouache and egg tempera), reminiscent of old advertising illustrations, encouraged a wistful nostalgia for lost passions that complicated the heroic renderings of her subjects.

It may be that the glory days of political protest have passed as surely as the seemingly limitless wealth of collectors like the Fricks. But the recent wave of protests against the war in Iraq, building as this review was written, gave Irish's History Lesson a fresh urgency and power.