Sandra Dawson
Lying nude on a dark slab, his hands resting behind his head, he looks like a man sleeping, except that his eyes are open. The bed seems to float in a tan sea of splotches, with nearby streaks and incisions echoing its form, enclosing it. Outside this cocoon, confusion reigns. The uneven tan ground, interrupted by red smears and crosslike marks, seems to represent the uncontrollable world of dreams, placing the man on the brink of a voyage into the unknown.
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A Chicagoan born in 1963 in Clarendon Hills, Dawson recalls the influence of her grandmother’s home, which she describes as a “wonderland of a house, full of keys and buttons and boxes and scraps–all kinds of things that kids love to get into.” Her art making began with “putting things together, making collages, creating fantasies,” and her paintings still resemble collage: “I use everything that I have: oil, latex, acrylic, tar, colored pencils, conte crayons. I have always worked very spontaneously, and my work is almost like writing in a diary.” Nonetheless Dawson–who’s exhibited often in Chicago of late (some other works are now at Gallery A)–achieves a consistent, recognizable look.
Other works are more like jokes on such aspirations. The figure in Reformed Ways #3 holds a pole in each hand, a chicken head on top of one and a horse head on the other. When Odilon Redon and Max Ernst depicted part-human, part-animal figures, they offered a powerfully disturbing glimpse of some netherworld of alternative creatures. By contrast the Dawson figure seems strictly human, just playing a game with some props, disguises that can be adopted or removed at will.
Books as repositories of knowledge are also important to Safdie; many of her titles include the word sefer, which is Hebrew for “book,” and she says that she thinks of the vertical glass plate dividing many of them as “almost like a page.” Sefer No. 38 is one of many in which the artist plays the role of a collector: on one side of a platform a seashell sits atop a glass plate while another seashell lies beneath it, like two specimens of “animal architecture” on display; a vertical glass plate at the center of the platform separates these items from a large, dark rock. The simple bifurcated geometry of the “Sefer” series also focuses attention on the heart of these works: the wispy, ghostlike reflections that come to stand for all the possibilities solid things themselves can’t represent–an object’s aura, its unseen past, its unpredictable future.
