Artifacts of artifice

Art in America, July, 1998 by Kate Linker

Throughout these works, symbolically weighted images -- hearts, lotus blossoms and wombs, for example -- are arranged within luminous monochromatic fields of red, yellow, black and white. The byes are either disposed loosely over the surfaces as if to evoke the constellated structure of a dream (Subtle Body, 1989), or aligned vertically, suggesting the anthropomorphic format of portraits. Many works use occult religious symbols. Subtle Body, for example, appropriates the format of certain Tantric meditative emblems that align images vertically, along the human body's axis. The mystical symbols are replaced by images with personal significance for the artist. The progression of the images -- a snail, a heart, a pitcher among them -- moves from earthly matter to an implied spiritual transcendence. The objects depicted in Subtle Body often have hard shells or firm contours that suggest an inner world hidden beneath external forms.

This structure of outside/inside, or disclosure and secrecy, reflects an analogy by which the physical body serves as a metaphor for the inner, "psychic" body, or unconscious. One piece, Temple of My Father, presents a minianthology of objects that symbolize Western concepts of masculinity -- a collection not too different from the ancient artifacts that Freud amassed. Not unexpectedly, several works in the series are self-portraits, In Of Myself, the physical body is dismembered and dispersed within a broad field, the drenched red of blood and passion, against which images or symbols read like shifting constellations. In Self-Portrait (pregnant), the generalized human form is used as an armature to support a group of fragmentary clay votive fetishes in the form of organs (eye, ear, hand, breast, foot). These objects are symmetrically disposed within a yellow field that centers on a bulbous urn -- an apt allusion to the artist, who was pregnant the time the work was made.

Discussing her work from 1989 to 1991, Charlesworth has remarked that the symbolism of its images reflects "a level of unconscious engagement in language." Her comment alludes to the psychoanalytic notion, surfacing in art discourse of the time, that the unconscious is structured like a language. Languagelike play also accounts for the interpretative plurality that confronts the viewer. In "Renaissance Paintings," the imagery of Italian Renaissance art is appropriated, abstracted from its context and broken down into individual components that are rearranged by the artist. The interlinking chains of images that result impel personal but open-ended narratives. Images are again disposed against colored fields so as to evoke dense emotions -- longing, loss, madness, fear.

In some works, the Renaissance iconography of the Madonna and the Holy Family provides a psychoanalytic triangle of mother, father and child; several titles (Complex, Denial) hint at Freudian archetypes. In Complex, the right panel contains individual figures of a Madonna and the Christ child, who gaze at each other across the dark field in a beatific image of reciprocated love; this mother-child dyad is opposed, in the left panel, by the figures of a female infant being instructed by a cherub in the ways of love. The arrangement of the figures is inherently unstable, and the separate forms seem to float within a diptych format of contrasting black and red panels that encourages gender-coded readings.