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In her third solo show at Vox, Joy Feasley
brings together a selection of brand-new paintings and drawings,
all from 2002, that exemplify her wide-ranging interests and ambitions
as an artist. She draws from her past experiences on her family's
dairy farm, her current life in a gritty section of Philadelphia
and her lifelong passion for camping. She teases the viewer with
cheesy images derived from kitsch and soft-core porn, yet also
employs autobiographical images with great sincerity. She extols
hedonistic nature worship, but tempers it with irony, and by using
industrial materials like resin, vinyl and aluminum. Some pieces
are beautifully and richly painted, others are crudely sketched
on cheap paper. What is one to make of all this? Feasley herself
explains it by citing charming idiosyncrasies found in a Campfire
Girls handbook. My strategy is to look closer.
With lush colors and velvety surfaces,
the seven paintings included in the exhibition illuminate Feasley's
thematic interests and demonstrate her skill as a painter. In
the vinyl-on-aluminum painting
Lake Erie, 12 x 16 inches, a young
woman wearing a greenish coat with a fur-lined hood appears to
be meditating. The woman looks pleasant enough, though somehow
without personality, like a generic saint who's been sweetened
up with an airbrush. Behind her there's a stark and wildly psychedelic
landscape -- turquoise and hot pink with a radiating linear pattern
of greenish flames and flower petals -- emblematic of her internal
visions. Triple Crotch Rocket,
a nearly abstract motorcycle stripe detail rendered in resin and
oil on plywood, and Go-Go,
a lovely, posthumous portrait of the artist's distinguished-looking
dog, indicate other areas of Feasley's painterly interest.
The six drawings in the show (all in pencil
on cheap construction paper) twist together divergent themes that
sometimes induce frisson in the viewer. Feasley's drawing technique
is purposely "crappy" (Feasley's description) and consists
of crabbed lines, undifferentiated value, conspicuous erasures
and few details. Shutterbug
(30 x 24 inches) shows a winsome young woman flashing a peace
sign, and wearing only a camera around her neck. In Future
Farmers of America, 30 x 38 inches,
Feasley infuses a wholesome scene of young women on a farm with
eroticism. Feasley's straightforward, unprettified approach emphasizes
the vulnerability of her subjects, while withholding important
information about their bodies and personalities. The effect is
edgy, irritating and intriguing. These drawings, and the rest
of Feasley's rich and complex work, are well worth a closer look.
Reproduced courtesy of the Philadelphia
City Paper
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more about this exhibition |
