ArtBistro

News >> Browse Articles >> Fine Art

POP-UP TARTS

“The Myth of Loneliness” may sound like Pollyanna, but in 2008 Wilson has found new friends. She has a new gallery, and she has made friends, too, with her own hands. The little girls in pencil and watercolor have put aside their skeletal alter egos, and the natural blonds in light dresses have joined a larger, more colorful cast. Their settings, too, have many colors. Besides the woods and landscapes devoid of vegetation, they escape into entire communities, if not exactly in perspective, at least with vertical layers that can fill the paper. Some of the warmest lighting comes where one might least expect it—atop a starlit tent canopy, in interiors, or scuba diving.

Amy Wilson’s I Had a Connection to the World (BravinLee Programs, 2007)A village has sprung up in the center of the gallery, too. Tabletop railroad tracks wind through paper trees, houses, and factories. Airplanes and birds hang by clear threads from the ceiling. Bare trees on a much larger scale tower over the rest for good measure, while the birds continue into a second room. Wilson had envisioned a pop-up book, but even as paper constructions they suggest that Henry Darger has given way to a children’s classic of her own devising. Her shift from works covering several large, horizontal sheets for many smaller drawings also suggests both a book and the gallery as natural environment.

Of course, the book contains words, lots of them, in full capitals, in speech or thought balloons. At the Jersey City Museum in late spring, she cautioned that her drawings had more text than before. One had to smile, since all her shows feel a bit like speed-reading War and Peace without a Napoleonic complex. The Daily News hardly had the literacy, not back when it singled out just one figure from five long sheets at the Drawing Center—and all to damn the artist as a critic of a bad war and to censor art planned for Ground Zero. However, the scale is an important part of the experience. It makes one imagine a single narrative that one can never quite put together, and it encourages one to read a bit here and a bit there, for moments of happiness, memory, anxiety, and discovery.

The moments are hers as well—a first kiss with her future husband, the realization that she could make art, the sense of a world outside her window, the release in learning that the imagination can help to fill it. When she shifted from found quotes for and against war to her own words, I wondered if she was in some way accepting responsibility—not so much for politics, but for her art and for herself. Those themes appeared to run through the series in Jersey City. Like the exhibition title, the new text may seem cheerier still. The little girls themselves take decisive action and find creature comforts, in autumn leaves and even in the rain. They swim the water, nestle in tunnels, and chop down a tree, perhaps to help the artist get over her stage of forest drawings.

I like happy endings as much as the next person, but I could take an exhibition title like this personally. Do not gag too fast, though. Should one see Prozac, perplexity, or irony? The undersea world could mean confinement, the tunnels escapism, and the fallen tree an aggression against nature—and a disturbing counterpart to an emotional breakthrough. The tabletop village has few signs of home, at least one of the airplanes has ended up on the ground where it does not belong, and I crashed briefly into a bird while reading the text. A model railroad can evoke child’s play or an unhealthy adult obsession.

Perhaps one should feel in oneself a little of both, and grounded has double meanings anyway. The text, especially toward the end, describes an isolated, painful childhood, with a terrifying realm outdoors and a near certainty that art is too difficult—broken only by the discovery that these days anything can be art. One cannot say for sure when the terror ended, especially with so many epiphanies from which to choose. Freud might have something to say about the repetition. All those words and images should put critics in their place, and I do not pretend to have understood. I can still imagine real children playing here, and I can imagine many other starting points in these drawings, for next time and for others.

---