A Model Experience
Ireland Wisdom Best of Bone and Blood at Carlye Packer, October 22- November 12
2111 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA. 90026
Ireland Wisdom is a painter and person I’ve admired a while now; which is why I let her paint me naked. Being a painter, being painted by another woman painter, is a special thing that feels like something BIG. Especially when you see that this other woman, really sees you, and sees you as a painter, so that’s how I became Vivien the Painter, because Ireland saw me truly.
Ireland Wisdom’s debut solo show at Carlye Packer Gallery is a challenging group of work that presents portrait paining at its most historic, technical, and confrontational. Wisdom’s meticulously rendered figures on stark backgrounds reference and modernize a century’s worth of art history into one expansive breath of imagery. Suspended in time, these paintings are a love poem to the documentation of looking deeply. They’re different than modernizations of portraiture, like Alice Neel or Lucian Freud among others, because they still speak in the masculine tongue of the old masters. A commanding young woman, adeptly filling their shoes, using their methods and material, feels transgressive and fresh.
Portrait painting holds such a unique power in part due to its incredible ability to represent the entire worth or value of a subject in an allegory of codes ad signs. Offered up as a highly curated dating profile pic, or visual resume, the portrait artist’s purpose historically was to give all the visual cues to convey status and character. Ireland Wisdom’s figures are not aristocrats depicted in idealized states, but friends and contemporaries living honest and bold lives away from artifice and pretention of Los Angeles and modern life in general. They are also types and bodies, which Wisdom has curated in her mind, linking them to figures of the past that stir up many associations and contradictions for the viewer.
Kings and Queens had their costumes on for their portraits, to depict a person of status nude was a social taboo, and one that Wisdom aggressively upsets, reveling in the naked body. The bodies and flesh are not passive, but fully engaged and utilitarian, entirely in control of their own sexual identity. There is no shame here, or humiliation, or even exploitation. The nudity in Wisdom’s paintings, while tantalizing, seems so full of force and distance as to take on the aura of being clothed, they are armored in color and light.
I was lucky enough to pose for one of these portraits, Vivien the Painter, the culmination of an ongoing creative relationship that began while attending Zorthian Ranch figure drawing where Wisdom facilitates. It seemed natural that our fondness and admiration for each other as artists, would become a painting. The experience of being made into a painting was to feel a communion with every sitter who ever found themselves standing for hours in a room. The ritual of portraiture as performance, the inversion of my own role as model, the painting of my painting within the painting; added up to an impression of myself beyond appearances.
Choosing to be painted nude was a collaborative railing against being the object of frequent projection of others presumptions of married motherhood, it allowed me to recover my own identity as a human machine capable of creation and destruction independent of societal expectations. I felt I was distilled within the canvas, though forces beyond my full understanding, into someone distinct from myself. My corporeal being has become something else now, duplicated within the canvas, inside the experience; when looking at it I see the version of me which is outside of time, a higher self of sorts. It is me in my truest form, as a painter, and a powerful one waiting to triumph.
Best of Bone and Blood avoids all the preciousness and intellectualizing that can come with contemporary painting, giving a raw interpretation of bodies and history. In her self-portrait, Wisdom is seen knowingly mooning the viewer, the art world, and society at large. It is with this attitude of rule breaking that historical observational painting can be renewed to our eyes. Each portrait the continuation of an ancient pact to make images of ourselves, to gain knowledge and become immortal in a very tangible way through the eyes of an artist.
Ireland Wisdom Best of Bone and Blood runs through November 12, at Carlye Packer Gallery.
False Cast-Road Show
Jessica Williams, Taylor Chapin, Jacob Lenc, and Sabrina Piersol.
False Cast Gallery is happy to announce “Road Show”, a pop up hosted at Santa Monica Prefecture, running August 13th – September 5th. Opening reception Friday August 13th 5-7pm, 1120 20th Street, Santa Monica, CA, in the alley between 19th and 20th streets.
“Road Show” came out of a simple conversation about the radical difference between San Diego and Los Angeles, two places which are so close geographically they seem they ought to be more similar. However, time itself seems incongruent and moves differently, even across the sand on the beach. We selected four artists, two working in each city; to anchor a story about time, place and representation.
Jessica Williams work explores the hidden and imagined landscapes of Los Angeles, familiar to us and also distant as shadows. The flickering candlelight on a woman’s shoulder, a conversation overheard in passing, or a desolate structure lit up by the moon. These worlds are brought into soft focus through Williams’s vibrant layers of reduction and reconstruction. Cascading swaths of rich tones increase almost imperceptibly in their depth, until at last you are plunged headlong into a landscape of mystery and untold beauty.
Jacob Lenc is also based in Los Angeles, yet in total opposition to Williams, his LA landscapes are laid bare and flat under the blazing sun. Lightning painted with childlike tactility scatters across the wall, a meadow is flattened up against the picture plane until it becomes a mass of strokes and color.
Taylor Chapin wraps mundane consumer goods in pattern and color, emphasizing their inherent banality while simultaneously enshrining them. Still life painting historically treats everyday domestic items as allegorical figures in a morality play. Here, rather than religious symbolism, we are made to question our detached relationship to industrialized consumerism, which fills our interior spaces and fetishizes their contents.
Sabrina Piersol uses pattern as dimension to offer delineation between obscure calligraphic shapes and gestures. Drawing on Sapphic poetry, the sensual lyrical structure of her imagery embodies that same bucolic longing, dripping with sacred moments and scattered strokes of color.