The Boston Phoenix, October 11, 1996

"BCA's 'Natural Immersion' is unnaturally good"

(caption) Ann Christensen: "Lush and Lusty"

Marianne Moore said greatness is a decision. She was talking about the same phenomenon as Albert Camus when he quipped that each of us is responsible for his or her face. These are hard facts to respect, let alone remember, in the light of Big Science, particularly Big Biology. When you learn, for instance, that identical male twins separated at birth turn out in middle age to smoke the same brand of cigarette and marry women with the same first name, the idea that anything at all significant remains under our control seems suspect. And that's on a good day.

Art has another argument to make. Within the limits of chance and inheritance, there are worlds (imaginary gardens with real toads, Moore called them) and faces to create. Among the immense and unexpected achievements of the "Natural Immersion" exhibit at the BCA is that it succeeds at both the gardens and the faces, at the aesthetic and the social. The work is often wonderful, and it puts forward a responsible face. Curated by Carole Anne Meehan with the kind of irreverent panache that used to make audiences flock to such original showcases, the show dwarfs its title. Presenting nine innovative and mostly regional landscape painters in the same space displays the postmodern daring of a rhymed poem. There's no denying that when it works it's dynamite, but virtually nobody's doing it. "Unnatural Ascension" might make more sense. The results are startling.

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The third major force in the "Natural Immersion" exhibit is the average-sized but hardly average landscapes of Ann Christensen. Typically no more than two by three feet, her paintings seem helplessly yet deliberately unsophisticated, the work of someone who cannot stop being provocative. Primitive and bold, her land and sea scapes pack an austere immediacy. In terms of both color and form and the intersection of the two (the brushstrokes seem like careless fingerprints, as if a thief knew herself to be untraceable) Christensen displays an unusual willingness to make choices, to decide on the primacy of the blue of the sky or the gold of a field or the white of a cloud. This may not sound like much, but it is. Whereas most landscape painters mute the differences among the images they depict, Christensen dares to accentuate, to define.

by Christopher Millis