Fictional company
Acme, best remembered from cartoon Wile E Coyote bears an unexpected
influence for the title of Ellen Gallagher’s retrospective, AxME. Playing upon
an ironic relationship between precision and unpredictability, Coyote uses
Acme’s efficiently delivered, yet failure prone traps and explosives in his
many attempts to ensnare the Road Runner.
The
continual regeneration of order and disruption emulates the basis of
Gallagher’s visual language. From painting and drawing to film, collage and
sculpture, Gallagher administers her own vast array of techniques to
re-occurring themes and motifs, creating structured surfaces that are disrupted
and intervened by patterns and extensive mark-making.
It is
important to note that, unlike other artist retrospectives, such as the major
Gerhard Richter retrospective a few years ago, AxME is non-chronological. This
is not a linear historical walk through of an artist’s development through time
and materials that some viewers enjoy; it is not a Retrospective in the
traditional sense. This method of display would not suit Gallagher. The work,
from many different periods is always in flux and in dialogue; she manipulates
recurrent thoughts, looking backwards and forwards at the same time, generating
a flexible structure that eludes the capture of categorization.
AxME begins
by familiarizing the viewer with themes of race, identity, gender and the
unknown, ideas that are echoed later in the exhibition. Her well known grid
like paintings, collaged with handwriting practice paper, evoke past memories
of childhood, learning and vulnerability. In Oogaboogah (1994) the aligned surface is a ground for isolated
areas of repetitive globular, bean like shapes. Viewed as abstraction or
minimalism from afar, the tiny patterns represent the stereotypical lips of
African minstrels, calling into question Gallagher’s own origins and childhood
experience, along with a darker side of American history.
Gallagher
speaks of issues that are prominent in her past heritage, dealing with the repression
of women. The ‘yellow paintings’ are Gallagher’s way of transporting images of
black women from the social constraints of the 1940–70’s. Found archival matter
from black lifestyle magazines of the time include adverts for wigs and
cosmetics.
 |
| Ellen Gallagher, Pomp Bang (1994) |
‘The
wigs admit an anxiety about identity and loss; they map integration, the civil
rights movement right through to Vietnam and women’s rights.’ Yellow plasticine is playfully stylized on to
the black and white images, confusing the domestic wigs with futuristic and
alien like helmets. Rows and rows of these
identity parades make up Double Natural (2002),
Pomp-Bang (2003) and Afrylic (2004) the large grids may lock
them out of their historical catalogues but the need to transform to be
socially accepted still resonates within the underlying ephemera.
Marine
creatures from the deep and futuristic organisms overlap and dissect figurative
forms in the Morphia series (2008-12).
The double sided drawings are displayed in slightly cumbersome looking frames,
but this may be forgiven as the viewer is allowed to weave between the
drawings. Gallagher’s incredible skill in cutting, scraping and manipulating paper
enable her to control what is revealed or hidden from sight. Figures are
cloaked in aqueous ink and watercolour taking on new uncanny hybrid forms. In
some areas the paper is cut right through; creating windows from one image to
the next, the ever changing proximities between the work and viewer delicately
build and destruct further compositions.
Arising from
the ‘yellow pictures’, ‘morphia series’ and other works in AxME are notions of
masks and disguises. Evocative of different cultures or social interventions of
which can be exhausting, concluding in the loss of identity and questioning who
you are and who you are meant to be. Gallagher always returns to this, but in
each revision the ideas are developed through the dynamics of unpredictability
and control. ‘It’s a shifting loop that
with each rotation doesn’t line up precisely.’
Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Until the 1st September
Ellen Gallagher: AxME
Until the 1st September
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