At McLean Project for the Arts, tales go spinning into a world of strange
Old World gone wild at McLean Project for the Arts
Cartoonish paintings by Gregory Ferrand, Nora Sturges and Matthew Mann drop us into an eerie plot.
(Courtesy Gregory Ferrand/ McLean Project for the Arts )- Gregory Ferrand’s “Solitaire, Family,” acrylic on canvas, on view at the exhibit “Small Stories” at McLean Project for the Arts.
By Mark Jenkins,
Feb 21, 2013 11:32
PM EST
The Washington
Post Published: February 21
Storytelling was blackballed from visual art by the
20th-century avant-garde, but it’s been creeping back in. Although the old
narratives haven’t returned, today’s artists are keen to recount lesser-known
tales, or recombine familiar archetypes in unexpected ways. Both things happen
in “Small Stories,” an intriguing show of precise, but not exactly realistic,
paintings at McLean Project for the Arts.
Nora Sturges, Gregory Ferrand and Matthew Mann all use
styles derived more from illustrations than Renaissance canvases. Their work is
cartoonish but impeccably detailed, representational yet eccentric. Sturges’s
little pictures are blankly surreal, depicting vacant landscapes in American
suburbia as well as what appear to be Old World deserts. Rendered in muted
earth or snow-country tones, the paintings often fix on institutional buildings
and mass-produced objects, including parking garages and precast-concrete
barriers. The eerie “Tank” focuses on what seems to be a large shipping
container, but the formal way it’s positioned suggests a sort of temple.
Perhaps that’s how future anthropologists will see such now-commonplace places
and things.
Ferrand’s paintings, which include a series of portraits,
conjure the look of old Hollywood. The women have neatly bobbed hair and the
men wear suits and ties — even when they’re running toward an airplane in one
of the show’s most dramatic works, the red-tinted “Explosion! If only they knew
what they know now.” Whether dream, hallucination or disaster-movie frame, the
scene teasingly reveals that Ferrand knows what time it is: The plane in the
background is a vintage propeller-driven model, but the woman at the center of
the composition is clutching both a small dog and a smartphone.
Although his style is not classical, Mann flaunts his
familiarity with Old Masters. Many of his pictures emphasize the intricate
folds of flowing drapery, whose depiction is a hallmark of traditional
painting. He partially paints over prints of famous artworks, and he remakes Fragonard’s
“The Reader” with the young woman’s face replaced by a blue grebe’s (among
other alterations). Mann’s magnum opus here is “Passion of St. George,” whose
image stretches across four canvases of different shapes and sizes. The saint
doesn’t appear, but there is a “Dear George” letter from the princess: She has
run off with the dragon. That’s not how the fable used to go, of course, but
the puckish rewrite is one way “Small Stories” justifies telling tales.
Rosemary Luckett, whose “Altered Terrain” is displayed
along the ramp leading to the arts center’s main gallery, also takes a playful
approach, but with serious intent. The collaged drawings depict a world where
technology threatens everything that lives — even those creatures who designed
and built the SUVs, bulldozers and industrial derricks that are among the
show’s motifs. Despite ominous imagery, the tone isn’t grim. The artist is
partial to rubber ducks, and she builds a forest from tree-shaped air
fresheners and shows a frog surrounded by microphones, ready to deliver the
message of these works: What Luckett calls the “web of life” is dangerously
frayed. After walking to the McLean Project for the Arts from the closest
Metrobus stop, count the SUVs in the parking lot.
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