Cranky Femme

I really do just love Carrie Marill’s work. She makes these astoundingly beautiful, precious gauche paintings. The other day she gave a short talk at the ASU Art Museum about her participation in the show that’s currently in the main gallery.

I wasn’t so sure about her most recent paintings, frankly. They seemed too bucolic. I was concerned that these images would loose the very thing that I like about Carrie’s work: the tension between stark graphic elements and the realism of her near-scientific renderings of flora and fauna. Not to worry… There’s plenty of tension conveyed through symbolism.

This is the image that’s been circulated a lot in the publicity for her series of works that directly cite some 1950’s education images she found in Paris. I would really like to know more about the original images, Carrie said some of the pictures were of the French colonies… there’s a bigger story here.  Carrie blew up the original images  and printed them on water color paper. She then modified the pictures to make various comments about contemporary environmental conditions and concerns. In this image (Be Realistic Demand the Impossible) you can see that she’s added a recycling bin, some solar panels to the roof of the cottage and modified the train to look like the Metro Light Rail. She also added a pig, to point toward the swine flu pandemic and a bicycle-powered washing machine. Cool!

My favorite in the series was Do You Have a Minute to Save the Planet? It bellows the often discordant relationship between activism and environmentalism that expresses itself at the site of consumerism – Carrie said she was thinking of the people outside Whole Foods who ask for your money or a signature.  But it also calls to mind a recent Honda advertisement in which a very hip fellow wearing a ” save the earth” tee shirt climbs out of a 1970s Civic, morphs according to the prevailing fashion trends across the past four decades and reenters his aught-modeled Civic looking ever so trendy. Back to the painting: I simply love the monumentality of the figure, it tells us everything we need to know.

She also talked a bit about a group of work hung on the opposite wall of the gallery including a stratified wall painting of  onomatopoeia for various bird calls laid over color-saturated river rock and a slew of trash arranged on the floor under the painting. These objects look like tumbled rocks, smooth on the edges by the water and sand. Look a little more closely and you can see they are pieces of styrofoam coolers and plastic debris. The material of these man-made and naturally formed objects resonate with the flatly colored rocks in each of her paintings that serve as perches for her bird studies. This Belted Kingfisher, for example, sits on a cluster of rather unlikely-hued flotsam that’s raises off the surface of the page.There’s the tension: bold and flatly colored graphic forms, enter the third dimension while the hyper-natural bird lies on the surface of the paper, its feathers as soft as the tooth of the page.

oooooh, good stuff.