New Work by Julia Shirar
Opening Reception: Saturday January 16th, 7 - 10pm
Show runs January 16th through February 20th
Asleep, 2008, Acrylic and oil on birch panel, 70 x 100 inches
1. the apocalypse is a laughing matter
Late one night last winter, Julia Shirar was driving home from Los Angeles, listening to a call-in program on a Christian station hosted by a charismatic preacher. He was talking about the economy. It was shortly after the bottom had fallen out, but before the government had stepped in-- a dire, uncertain moment. A caller asked the preacher if he should increase his investments or take it all out of the market. 'You're a God-fearing man,' the host replied. 'Go ahead, take a risk. It doesn't matter anyway-- the apocalypse is upon us. Remember, the Lord will provide. In my opinion, you should buy.'
Shirar's compelling paintings and drawings embody the combination of fear, greed, an all-too-human desire for truth and safety, and a dark, dark humor suggested by this anecdote. In the world inhabited by her pensive figures, naked or semi-clothed, the Final Days have come. Unlike the fire and brimstone preachers she remembers from her Southern Baptist upbringing, though, Shirar is not suggesting that the Apocalypse is really in full swing. But what if it were? What if the end of civilization was taking place outside these quiet interiors, complete with falling frogs, blood, bombs, food riots, poisoned, polluted air and water?
Instead of picturing that chaos, Shirar's images assert the primacy, for each of us, of our own mental architecture - of memory itself. She works from observation and imagination rather than photographs, with the goal of focusing attention on the present moment as a construction of a succession of impressions, both mental and physical. Such moments, she implies, are slowly altered into memory's vast and unwieldy composite.
As if to emphasize the organic, unpredictable nature of this process, she paints life-sized or larger figures across a gradual accumulation of panels or pieces of fabric that are fastened either to each other or to the wall. The completed image seems at first to have a unified point of view, but subtle changes throughout the picture plane skew space. There are other indicators that what we see is not meant to represent reality, per se-- random birds, floating televisions, levitating pumpkins. There is also the way the figure comes into focus more in one place than another. (Shirar has mentioned an interest in James MacNeill Whistler and William Singer Sargent - painters who mastered this kind of localized intensity.) What do we really focus on, anyway, both in the moment and in memory? The face; hands, the turn of a hip, the texture of fabric.
In George is not Asleep, a portly, aging man reclines on-- well, a recliner/ La-z-boy/ Barcalounger, in a space defined more by pattern than perspective. His right arm, hanging loosely over the edge of the chair, is borrowed from David's painting of the dead Marat in his bath. Like fragments of memory, other images hover in the periphery: a pair of boxing gloves, a factory at night. The recliner's rolled trim is painted on one area, but in another, Shirar creates an illusion of it by pressing painted fabric on the panel's surface. Her strategies recall those of Surrealist Max Ernst, who devised many ways to begin his compositions, in order to defend himself from the terrifying expanse of blank white with which a picture begins.
In Pumpkin, our point of view shifts radically. Like a fly on the ceiling (or one of the birds that appear in several other works) we're looking down, on a naked and somewhat tumescent young man. His figure is framed by a patterned rug; the floor boards around it move in interesting directions, almost as if everything is levitating slightly - including the pumpkin that gives the painting its name. These shifts in gravity and perspective suggest the way that memory corrects itself - the constant process of checking, rechecking, and adding to the information the eye acquires through other sensory data. We may think we know a place from previous visits, but (consciously or unconsciously), add new information with each viewing. We can't help ourselves. We forget the things we once knew, as they are covered over with new layers of memory.
2. If it's all the same all over, the picture dies. --J.S.
Photographs, generated as they are by a mechanical device, cannot privilege one area over another. Only looking can do that. Those who watched Sargent in his studio noted that he wore a track right through the carpet behind his easel from constantly moving close, to put his brush to the canvas, and then backing away. Observation was everything. He had to know how things looked from more than one perspective. Sometimes he would labor over a part of a picture for hours, only to wipe it out - and then paint it again, at the next sitting, in ten minutes. He was drawing on what he already knew, as well as what he could see in front of him.
In a world dominated by singular images - capturing an instant, frozen in time - Shirar believes that painting still has the potential to picture something outside of the succession of seconds in which we exist. To beat time at its own game. If the apocalypse is upon us, then we had better figure out a way to fool it into a holding pattern, until we can turn things around.
-- text by Maria Porges
www.juliashirar.com