International Gallery of Contemporary Art

April 6 - 29, 2001

Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage, AK

Mark Muro

April 20, 2001

pp. F1-2

Opposites Attract to Create Thought-Provoking Art Show

An unexpected synergy has occurred this month at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art. Two artists whose work at first glance appears to be as congruent as urchins and cold cream are showing side by side. Yet taken together, their work conspires to create a thought-provoking exhibition that is thematically complementary, even harmonious.

San Francisco artist Cheryl Coon fuses the organic with the manmade, poetically tweaking our perceptions about art, natural science and the environment. Amber Johnson of Anchorage, working within the tight and traditional confines of watercolor, paints representational pictures that stimulate notions concerning what we consider animal and what is human.

In the large gallery, Coon presents a sculptural installation featuring found elements from the natural world. Dried skeletal leaves, desiccated pods, beeswax and mud are combined with plastic, glass and paper to create a new, artificial context for these basic components of life.

As in nature, the most successful examples of Coon’s art are dependent upon endless repetition, multiplicity, and variation. This is nowhere more apparent than in “Thread and Nails,” a stunning arrangement of hundreds of star-shaped barbs that speckle the gallery’s longest wall. Each prickly individual consists of a cluster of one-inch nails, wrapped together with thread. The mounting of this piece was accomplished by forcefully throwing the spiny faux-creatures onto the wall at random. The result is a powerful work of art, a beautiful constellation that seems to belong as much to the night sky as to a coral reef.

Coon’s obsessive labeling, cataloging and intricate systems for displaying these substances effectively transforms the art gallery into a hall of science. This relentless presentation of organism as artifact reflects our domination and total objectification of nature. Coon shows us art imitating nature imitating art and replants this perplexity in our consciousness.

Just as Coon delves into our relationship with the environment, Amber Johnson explores our tendency toward anthropomorphism. The small gallery is lined with a series of 20 small watercolors, collectively titled “Animality.” Johnson attempts to blur the distinction between the animal and the human by painting scenes from an opulent masked ball. We observe a bestiary of beautiful people, mostly stylishly thin women, who seem to be sleepwalking. They wear a variety of life-sized animal heads that range from the exotic to the familiar. Johnson skillfully orchestrates her animal/people through a suite of surrealistic tableau, further enhancing a claustrophobic formality that is as mannered and far from the natural as possible.

The diminished scale of Johnson’s work draws the viewer close, forcing an intimacy that is more akin to reading a book than viewing a painting. These paintings, in fact, could very well be illustrations from a book of adult fairy tales. Like Persian miniatures painstakingly rendered in luminescent jewel tones, Johnson captures the brilliant plumage, luxuriant fur and haunting eyes of wild creatures, along with the velvet, silk, satin and flesh of their human counterparts.

A cool theatricality permeates these scenes, and rarely does Johnson show us a human face unmasked. When we do glimpse one, the face seems frozen and implacable. Johnson's subjects require the artifice of a mask to animate their true, hidden selves. The ritualized function of the masquerade permits a state of freedom, a way into one's totemistic alter ego.... Johnson's paintings capture precise moments in time that give expression to the mythic charge carried by each particular animal's archetypal reputation. The highly refined social settings depicted in "Animality” often allow an erotic tension to mingle ironically with innocence. These detailed portraits of character and behavior always reveal more than they conceal.

The respective work of Johnson and Coon asks us to reconsider the distinctions we draw between the world we live in and the world we must share with other forms of life. This intriguing double show prompts investigation into the ways we use nature to discover our own humanity or deny its existence.