Rebecca Nemser

Work­ing in bronze, that most ancient and endur­ing of mate­ri­als, JUDY MCK­IE’s work reveals the pow­er of art to con­sole and heal. Her Bird Foun­tain has the silent, soar­ing pres­ence of great mourn­ing mon­u­ments. “The water makes you feel calm and peaceful,” she says. “It’s nour­ish­ing. A life force.”

Many of the artists here are of a gen­er­a­tion who reject­ed the con­ven­tion­al com­forts of orga­nized reli­gion — and now they find them­selves fac­ing the inevitable mys­tery of death alone. They are re-invent­ing rit­u­als that feel authen­tic to them and find­ing new ways to sat­is­fy their spir­i­tu­al needs. Paper Prayers has become one such con­tem­po­rary heal­ing rit­u­al — a small con­gre­ga­tion of artists gath­ered togeth­er In the Spirit.

FRIDA KAHLO’s Self-Por­trait with Thorn Neck­lace and Hum­ming­bird shows her in a jun­gle with but­ter­flies in her hair and a hum­ming­bird dan­gling from a thorn neck­lace that pierces her neck, draw­ing small red drops of blood. “I nev­er paint­ed dreams,” she said. “I paint­ed my own reality.”

The prayers were long, thin strips of paper or can­vas, newsprint, pho­tographs, or tin­sel, embell­ished with draw­ings, paint, cut‑outs, dried ros­es, gold leaf, but­tons, beads. Some were abstract; some had words; oth­ers had musi­cal nota­tions writ­ten on them. One prayer was made from a piece of old, paint‑splattered blue jeans, with a peace sym­bol and love beads. 

His sculp­ture is like a very sophis­ti­cat­ed game of musi­cal chairs, where all the pieces come togeth­er for a moment of per­fect, pre­car­i­ous bal­ance. In his draw­ings, the char­coal keeps on danc­ing, long after the music stops.

LOUIS CARTIER used pre­cious met­als and jew­els in a high­ly pol­ished, sparkling, and yet almost casu­al way way — the way Fred Astaire and Gin­ger Rogers danced. The shim­mer of dozens of tiny dia­monds on a cool plat­inum sur­face is the essence of sophis­ti­ca­tion –- like a Cole Porter song. 

One of DAVID SALLE’s favorite movies is Dou­glas Sirk’s IMITATION OF LIFE. In one scene, all the char­ac­ters are jammed into a taxi, watch­ing a funer­al through the win­dows. In Salle’s paint­ings, too, many dif­fer­ent things are hap­pen­ing at once, every­thing is crammed togeth­er, noth­ing seems fin­ished, every­thing is seen in reflec­tion or jux­ta­po­si­tion or through a fil­ter or a pane of glass, and all of the con­tra­dic­tions are left unresolved.

LOU JONES’s por­trait of a musi­cian shows a beau­ti­ful old woman with strong hands and a clear, untrou­bled face. You can feel that she’s lis­ten­ing to music; there’s a vision­ary gleam in her eyes. Her por­trait is jux­ta­posed with a fad­ed daguer­rotype of a 19th cen­tu­ry singer known as the Black Swan.

GYORGY KEPES paints with a mix­ture of oil paint and sand, which gives his work a rough, earthy tex­ture. He likes to tell the sto­ry of Antaeus, a hero who was the son of Moth­er Earth and could nev­er be defeat­ed as long as he touched the earth. Paint­ing with sand is Kepes’s way of touch­ing the earth.

“It can be fright­en­ing, but that’s life,” said Doug. “Art is part of life,” said Mike. “It’s a real part — it’s the essence of life,” said Doug. “There’s no rea­son to make it per­fect,” says Doug. “We want to show the phys­i­cal nature,” said Mike. “The phys­i­cal nature,” said Doug. “Of every­thing, but in par­tic­u­lar, Art,” said Mike.

Stand­ing at the cen­ter of the spi­ral, I see the backs of all the chairs fac­ing away from me, and feel a tremen­dous shock of lone­li­ness and loss. Look­ing down from the bal­cony, I see that the chairs are the begin­ning of a spi­ral that could go on forever.

From the win­dow of the stu­dio ED RUSCHA had in the 1960’s, he could see a sign read­ing HOLLYWOOD. The big white let­ters are as flat an fake as an old, aban­doned movie set, crum­pled and peel­ing, with some of the let­ters falling down. But Ruscha’s many images of that sign make it a real sign, lumi­nous and charged with light. 

“It’s all com­ing from mem­o­ry,” says ROBERT FERRANDINI. “From fairy tales, from child­hood — from imag­in­ing. The way I see it, it’s the land­scape of the mind. Lots of land­scapes came to me from the movies. Fort Apache. Red Riv­er. Cheyenne Autumn. The Searchers. The idea of the search — which is what I do as a painter. I go into it. I search.”

ROGER KIZIK’s loopy, stac­ca­to line describes fish­ing boats with names like Frol­ic or Finast Kind, hous­es on the beach, the book he is read­ing or the tool he is using for fix­ing up his house or boat. The things in his draw­ings press in on him; they clus­ter around him, rich with hid­den cor­re­spon­dences and secret mes­sages, com­pos­ing his life.

JESSECA FER­GU­SON’s con­struc­tions often con­tain old post­cards, which seem to have been sent from places that have long since dis­ap­peared. Lost, ruined, or for­got­ten, they have left behind only pale and ghost­ly traces. Enshrined in lit­tle box­es, like the bones of saints in medieval reli­quar­ies, her work cel­e­brates the some­times mirac­u­lous pow­er of mem­o­ry to trans­form the pain and com­plex­i­ty of real life into the stuff of dreams, and art.

RITSUKO TAHO’s ever-chang­ing instal­la­tion is a spare but ele­gant invi­ta­tion to par­tic­i­pate in a work of art, both lit­er­al­ly and metaphor­i­cal­ly – by bring­ing more leaves, and by mak­ing a leap of imag­i­na­tion that trans­forms a heap of trash on a vacant lot into a poem in sil­ver and brown.

FRANCES HAMIL­TON’s art does­n’t come from the head; it comes from the hand and the heart. And that’s why a show of her work is always so reward­ing. Her images stay with you, grow­ing rich­er and deep­er, as time goes by. They trig­ger mem­o­ries. Major or minor, they touch a chord.

Artists look at ani­mals: the roman­tic fan­ta­sy ani­mal, the prim­i­tive art ani­mal, the hid­den dri­ves ani­mal, the whim­si­cal ani­mal, the ele­men­tal ani­mal, and oth­er myth­i­cal beasts. As Walt Whit­man wrote,
“I think I could turn and live with ani­mals, they are so placid and self contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.”

ROBERT FERRANDINI’s ear­ly work fea­tured fly­ing saucers and mon­sters, imagery drawn from a 1950’s child­hood spent watch­ing sci­ence-fic­tion movies like When Worlds Col­lide and The Thing. In his new paint­ings of imag­i­nary land­scapes and seascapes, he has come to some kind of terms with his past and is ready to move on. His space­ship has final­ly land­ed in a world of his own making.

Draw­ings as a pic­ture mak­ing, sto­ry telling, dream machine. Draw­ings that dance, stretch, yearn, arch, and glide across the page. The plea­sures of look­ing emerge here not from what is observed but from how it is ren­dered; not the image but the artifice. 

Yet there is exhil­a­ra­tion in the ter­ror, the ver­tig­i­nous fall. These speedy, vio­lent fan­tasies of destruc­tion and chaos are ten­der­ly, beau­ti­ful­ly described. The draw­ings in graphite and lin­seed oil – the oil used won­der­ful­ly as col­or – and the swirls of paint in eerie sea greens or fiery reds com­pose a bal­anced, painter­ly sur­face. The lan­guage of abstrac­tion pulls us upward, as the images plunge us into the abyss.

False masks of plas­tic beau­ty are among its mov­ing tar­gets. Des­per­ate to sur­vive the glis­san­do of the word proces­sor and the dead­ly lull of ordi­nary life, it rips to pieces the world’s fab­ric and its skin and puts it back togeth­er, obses­sive­ly recre­at­ing from scraps and scrawls and marks and images the objects of its desire and its rage.

Each rec­tan­gle is like a pic­ture of a pic­ture, mov­ing through a series of trans­for­ma­tions. The tremu­lous draw­ings are like jot­tings, hiero­glyph­ics, mes­sages in bot­tles, unread­able post­cards, ideas com­ing into being, the first appear­ances of the not-yet-vis­i­ble, the impal­pa­ble images tak­ing form before our eyes.

FRANCES HAMILTON has refash­ioned much-loved images, mem­o­ries, and dream­strans­form­ing them into a ful­ly re-imag­ined uni­verse. It is this trans­for­ma­tion – the seri­ous, dif­fi­cult task of art – that gives her work its pow­er to enchant.