JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH
through November 25
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Ten Thousand Years contains the outline of an elk Smith took from a 10,000-year-old Siberian rock drawing. Painted broadly and in various colors–red, green, and white, often at the same time–the figure seems almost to vibrate, as if alive, suggesting an icon. Just above the head is a cutout print of leaves and flowers placed as if sprouting from the antlers, as if the elk were connected to, and even a source for, other natural life. Also near its head is a black-and-white line drawing of an Indian on horseback riding in the same direction the elk is facing. The two canvases of this diptych are placed together with only a small crack between them, and the way the elk continues across the break adds to the figure’s presence and power.
But this picture speaks with other voices as well: around the elk are present-day advertisements and illustrations, among them multiple images of a fierce-looking Indian labeled “Wenatchee Chief”–presumably some product logo. There are food coupons, illustrations of plants, cartoon bears, and children’s games or puzzles, including a maze in which the player is asked to “help the woolly mammoth find its young”–a cartoonish reference to an earlier time. The hovering elk’s transcendent mystery is the opposite of the bright blue ad for a “space pen,” whose colors have all the flat, stuck-in-themselves qualities of commercial imagery. But there are degrees of authenticity and power even among the present-day images. One can hardly endorse the Wenatchee chief, any more than one could a cigar-store Indian–yet this rendering has a certain stark power when compared with the cartoon bears nearby.
Corey McCorkle’s two “portraits” on stainless steel of Shirley MacLaine show liberation’s opposite. These are the only works in either show that reveal almost no sign of the artist’s hand, and they’re the simplest compositionally; yet they struck me as in some ways the most powerful. All we see in Shirley: Don’t Fall Off the Mountain is a color photocopy of an image of MacLaine that appeared in one of her books, with an irregularly shaped comic-book thought balloon a bit above her head to the right containing a part of the same pic- ture: Shirley is thinking of herself. McCoy’s comment in the exhibit brochure seems apt: “Reincarnation is the ultimate repetition; the individual as many. . . . Narcissism serves as series.”
