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The Boston Phoenix, June 4, 1999 |
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"Spring sightings along Newbury Street" (caption) Signature Work: the meditations of Ann Christensen's "Earth Song" are never complacent. "Ann Christensen: Passionate Landscape" Although I've never seen a word written on the subject, let alone a study done (get out your laptops, graduate students), its logical to assume that just as the average home has shrunk in size over the years (remember Grandma's house?), so too has the average gallery, This is a problem. To see anything requires perspective, and perspective depends, in the visual arts, on space and sight lines. Without the right distance, the Sistine Chapel's ceiling would feel as crushing as an elevator roof. A Henry Moore sculpture would in modest living rooms register like a heap of landfill: The same holds true for diminutive works. Stand too close to a Joseph Cornell box and it seems as coarse and irritating as the collected debris of a bower bird, Stand too far away and it makes no greater demands than the photos of models in unsold picture frames. It's enough to make you wonder to what extent entire artistic movements - minimalism for one - owe their inspiration to the increasingly claustrophobic conditions in which galleries display art. Nowhere is the tension between the limitations of gallery space and the demands made by the art more pronounced than in the current exhibit of Ann Christensen's powerful paintings at the Michael Price Gallery. Christensen creates bold, bright, highly distilled landscapes. Her work makes you think of a master painter suffering from multiple sclerosis, as if she had to make each brush stroke count for 20. Her intense clarity, simplified forms, and unexpectedly nuanced graduations of color - the way the bank of a marsh goes black by the water's edge, or a cloud face lifts white from a gray mass - are expressive, dramatic evocations of nature's tumultuous stillness. And yet sardined as they are in the small confines below street level at 285 Newbury Street - for the most part you can't stand back more than a couple of feet from any of Christensen's oils, and even then you're confronted with many frames simultaneously - they present a serious challenge to the seasoned let alone the less experienced viewer. A show that ought to be earning great critical and popular attention (Christensen has been gradually building an audience over the decades, and this is her first solo Boston show) instead seems uncomfortably bottled up, a giant of a genie in a stoppered lamp. Even so, the artist's immensity seeps through. "Earth Song" is a signature work, a small (16 by 20 inches) oil of a waterway, apparently an estuary in a tidal marsh. We witness the glass-flat surface of the water from above as it curves, together with the sunlight, into the upper right quadrant of the frame. Yet Christensen's curves are never smooth (the estuary's angles look like tears in the land), and her meditations on earth and sun are never complacent. In the foreground, where the tones gather darkness and momentarily invite a peaceful mood, the artist daubs large, thick moments of stark yellow paint, challenging both our perspective and our sense of closure on the scene. The eye moves back and forth between the comfort of what we think we know, a sunset on a marsh, and what we can't make sense of, heads of flowers emerging from the tops of trees. by Christopher Millis |