Dreams mix the imagery of waking experience with a hint of the infinities that surround us, out in the dark beyond. In her second solo show at William Busta Gallery, titled Mystery Hatch, Cecelia Phillips shows 15 oil paintings executed in a loosely realistic style on canvas and paper. Most are dreamlike visions focused on animals or objects in a state of metamorphosis, headed toward death or decomposition or depicted in the aftermath of an event that has altered their integrity, partially translating them into a new context.
Two works show the severed heads of a sheep and a deer as in
Renaissance nature morte paintings, meditating on the strange
liveliness of dead things. Among the deceased invoked here are the past
lives of painting itself, superimposed on contemporary preoccupations.
“After Vermeer” derives from one of the Flemish master’s vivid small
portraits known as “The Wrightsman” or “Study of a Young Woman,” chosen
by Phillips partly for the differences between it and the similarly
composed, more famous “Girl With a Pearl Earring.” In the original, the
young woman has a hard-to-define strangeness, as she gazes directly at
us with a thin smile, turning from a fathomless dark background. In
Phillips’ work on paper, that magical darkness has crept further into
the girl, changing her and emphasizing the un-cinematic quality of her
face; in terms of pop culture, this is the “other” to Scarlett
Johansson’s more accessible “self.”
Sea changes are everywhere at Mystery Hatch, which takes that
title from an enigmatically lovely, nearly abstract work in which an
incandescent, glowing area sweeps downward and fades into warm gray
shadows. The light emanates from behind two dark, angled shapes, and
above them at the top of the canvas, ambiguous green strokes like
out-of-focus leaves stretch over richly varied indigo. We could be
looking at a “hatch” opening either in a clearing or in mid-air,
something like a scene from the TV series Lost. Metaphorically,
the ambiguity of this image opens the door to the alternate dimensions
of fantasy and reverie that Phillips explores.
Particularly surprising and successful is “Exploded Shed,” showing
the aftermath of a blast that splintered one end of a long, garage-like
white structure. Siding peels away from the middle of the building in
strips, curving out almost organically — a little like jaws or
tentacles. “Albatross” depicts a compact station wagon stranded in a
misty swamp or marsh. The bird, wings outspread, perches on its raised
hood. Like the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner,” this portentous bird presides over a human thing
becalmed and stranded in the seas of the imagination, tangled near some
far shore of rebirth.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2009.
I love your work! Just like Hemingway’s writing you give just the tip of the iceberg and let us discover the other 90% for ourselves!