Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

Filling the void
Duane Slick’s wolves and irises at Nielsen Gallery
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Duane Slick: A Wolf in the Irises"
Nielsen Gallery, 179 Newbury St, Boston, Through October 22


Related Link

Nielsen Gallery's official Web site

In an era of circus-sized installation art, ceiling-to-floor photography, and videos that take up the entire sides of buildings, the art of Duane Slick is a barely audible whisper. Nothing jumps out at you, nothing startles, nothing is blown out of proportion. You work to see his images, which typically lie behind an opaque white screen of flat acrylic paint. They loom at a dreamy distance, resisting focus, objects dimly discernible in fog. And the images themselves — flowers and trees, coyotes and birds, evanescent, fractional portraits — share a kind of muteness, since they take the shape of silhouettes or outlines or lightly drawn sketches.

In every piece, Slick addresses some aspect of what it means to be Native American. (His father hails from the Meskwaki Nation of Iowa, his mother from the Ho-Chunk Nation on the Nebraska-Iowa border.) He makes you contemplate the eradication of culture and nature; he probes the meaning and magnitude of loss. In an interview two years ago, he spoke of his movement from colorful abstract landscapes toward the elimination of color and a greater absorption in narration and the figure. Yet for all his continued interest in identifiable, symbolically charged figures, this show suggests he’s returning to abstraction. Few are the details; many are the voids.

Nowhere is this feeling of disappearance and longing more poignantly conveyed than in the four 17x14 linen panels that make up Requiem Dream. With their burnished, dark surfaces and seemingly faded imagery, the panels resemble 19th-century photographs — they look as if they’d been worn by the passage of time. In the first, all you can make out are the stars of an American flag that wraps around some undetectable, spherical form. The second offers an identical but more obscure version of the first. Only in the third frame does the freestanding flag explain itself, as the head and shoulders of a woman with Native American features appear above the patterned cloth with which she’s draped herself. In the fourth panel, she’s gone again, disappeared.

I found myself scrutinizing the three paintings where the body is missing — how could I not see her when I knew she was there? Why is she invisible? And how is it that the very symbol of our nationhood renders her so? Requiem Dream isn’t just a concept piece, however; it gets its impact from the expression of the shadowy figure who hovers between specter and flesh. Her look is one of infinite acceptance, disarming resignation: she smiles in the magnitude of her sadness, a generous, loving, decimated shade. Perhaps, too, she’s asking the artist to examine the moral legitimacy of making art from the suffering of one’s ancestors. Slick doesn’t dodge that question. In Pre-Contact Landscape in Milkweed Patch (2005), traditionally attired Native American men occupy a cloudy space that includes flowers in silhouette and business logos, Westinghouse’s crown-like logo, and Mobil’s trademark Pegasus. A lesser artist would have been content to juxtapose emblems of the natural world with symbols of corporations that profit by its decline. Not Slick. Right up there beside the men and the logos appear the last four words you’d expect to see: Artforum and Art in America, painted in white acrylic, the names of the two most recognized American visual-art magazines, in their trademark fonts. You don’t need to be a corporate mogul, the artist acknowledges, to profit from the decline of the natural world; you can be an artist with an eye for notoriety and sales.

Subtler and more pared down than Pre-Contact is another 2005 work, Oration at Dawn, in which a barely visible silhouette of the artist’s head in profile appears to be choked and gagged by a continuous loop of flowers. Slick is a master at creating a sense of apparent stillness that’s actually the center of a whirling storm. Nobody’s holding the gun in Sparrows Dream #1, and the barrel is aimed at nothing more than a tulip. But the flower stands upright, suggesting a body, and the gun points to the blossom as though threatening to blow off its head. In Necessity of Snakes, a wreath of static, interlocking images in silhouette — leaves and birds, rabbits and elk, snakes and men — is capped by the Shell logo, as if to say we all become fossil fuel. In Oration at Dawn, the intimation of violence is ratcheted up, not so much by action as by stillness. How does the figure maintain his composure with his airwaves blocked? How does one find calm in the face of death?

These are dream paintings whose aim is the exploration of matters spiritual, not physical. Since we can’t entirely see what we’re looking at, we’re made to think about absence — the absence of people, the absence of color, the absence of a fully articulated narrative. Yet it’s our very attention to the void that wants to pull us back to the earth, to the animal kingdom, to sensation and awareness and movement. Slick’s motifs include the coyote and the wolf, whose shadowy presence feels more human than alien. In A Wolf in the Irises, the wolf stands upright and appears to be dancing — a man in a wolf costume? In Verifying the Invisible (Coyote and Tulip), the transparent coyote passes through a network of perched songbirds. In Coyote, Orchid and Tulip, multiple flowers are superimposed on the dark outline of the animal’s head. Far from registering as predators, Slick’s coyotes and wolves are associated with the gentle and beneficent, fellow characters in our shared drama of survival.


Issue Date: October 21 - 27, 2005
Back to the Art table of contents
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group