Flicker

Flicker brings together five contemporary artists whose work is inspired by fleeting moments of beauty, decadence, and social ritual. The artists––JoAnne Carson, Jeff Davis, Timothy Horn, Bettina Sellman, and Kevin Zucker––pay tribute to outmoded visions of glory and grandeur, not to arrest the passage of time but rather to point up the absurdity in thinking that we can. In an effort to link the present with the past, they penetrate conventional, obsolete, or passé forms in search of something more complex and felt. 

The excessiveness of these works provides a striking contrast to the architectural backdrop of the University Art Museum’s Modernist exhibition space, designed by Edward Durell Stone. Flicker illuminates both the fadedness of modernism and the false promise of restoration inherent in the seduction of its past accomplishments. Yet the exhibit also unites seemingly oppositional historical forces by highlighting the quest for perfectionism that underlies the brightest hopes of any era: the superficial gives way to genuine longing, and there is a glimmer of transformative potential, even within the fragmentation of the present. 

JoAnne Carson’s abundant flora and fauna sculptures are made from fiberglass and thermoplastic. Their size, however, defies rationality: most are over eight feet high and three feet wide. Like a Baroque flower arrangement on steroids, Puppet’s Revenge is at once gorgeous and threatening, for encoded in its gilded branches and pulsating blooms is a warning that all is not right with the natural world.  Fictitious species sprout in every direction; distorted and overblown, at first glance these fantastic reconstructions appear comic.  But on closer scrutiny, Carson’s desire to both charm and dissuade turns her lovely bouquet into a potent stand-in for the inevitable decay (both biological and historical) that follows even the most auspicious flowering.     

Jeff Davis’s watercolors and pencil drawings are filled with perverse acts and false heroics. Located somewhere between the deft touch of an Old Master’s sketch and the tossed-off scrawl of a teenage doodle, Davis’s instinctively delicate drawing style belies the psychological magnitude of the indiscretions he depicts. Diminutive musclemen, gargantuan severed heads with spigots for mouths, and Muppet-like creatures devour one another amidst storm clouds, lightening bolts, and down-pouring bodily fluids. Bathed in an eerie illumination, fallen men and angry gods struggle to ward off their impending fate. Although an occasional lost soul shouts in defiance of misery and frail humanity in a desperate search for enlightenment, redemption seems like a dubious goal in the wake of so much folly. Similarly, Davis’s sculptures, made of wax and cast from rubber Halloween masks, combine the suggestion of classical Roman busts ravaged by time with the throwaway humbleness of a home décor candle bought at the mall. These are images of one culture devouring another––or at least dancing on the edge of the abyss.

Timothy Horn uses cast crystal and plated bronze to fabricate chandelier-size sculptures based on eighteenth-century jewelry patterns. He resurrects precious gems as lost objects of desire and renders them gigantic, radically altering their original context by making them superfluous and thus over-signified. No longer intimate possessions, these objects dazzle and confound with a faux brilliance that upends conventional readings associated with wealth, power, and taste.  Horn’s interest in reshaping historical hierarchies is also furthered in his most recent wall works, which are based on eighteenth-century furniture patterns. In these, he uses transparent amber-colored rubber to distort his tasteful sources into objects that creep, ooze, and dangle down the walls with a libidinal force all their own. Their deflated power competes with the inherent value of virtuosity for its own sake.       

Bettina Sellman’s paintings evoke the conventions of Old Master portraits, conveying a sense of both mourning and desire articulated through familiar painterly conceits. Using multi-layered, translucent pigments in pale pinks, powder blues, and Day-Glo yellows and greens, Sellman renders delicate watercolors on canvas in which solidity and form immediately break into fluid distortions. By peeling back the confines of exterior controls in this way, she reveals the truly illusory and contrived nature of representation. And by penetrating the outward signs of entitlement, Sellman gives us a more socially charged and internalized portrayal of her subjects, suggesting the psychological isolation and inevitable decay that lie just beneath the surface of perfected appearances. 

Kevin Zucker uses computer software, carbon transfer, and acrylic paint to create large-scale canvases in which Modernist design schemes form a disorienting alliance with Baroque and eighteenth-century Georgian interior décor. Beneath meticulously hand-painted glazes, the layered surfaces of his paintings simultaneously reveal and obscure their computer-generated origins. Using a palette of muted grays and browns, Zucker depicts empty drawing-room situations where rules of decorum are played out through strategic arrangements of chairs, mirrors, and chandeliers. A faded opulence permeates these polite interiors, and the overall mood is melancholic as the artifice associated with outmoded conventions gives way to a sense of genuine longing for past accomplishments. This mood is further articulated in Zucker’s paintings of ancient ruins: even within the decrepit lies the potential for transformation.

The exhibit’s title deliberately invokes several metaphors: the quality of illumination provided by the movement of a candle flame burning low; the unsteady alternation of light and darkness; shadowy presences whose preferred habitat is the boundary between seen and unseen; the flash of recognition that can be seized only for an instant before disappearing; the passage of events over the landscape of history; a suspended moment before change. It is this last metaphor that perhaps best captures how the artists of Flicker make their art: through the reinvigoration of faded stylistic conventions associated with portraiture, ornamentation, and architectural design, they explore how the vestiges of eras grander and more heroic than our own continue to haunt the contemporary imagination.