Jeff McMahon
Katy Fischer: Highlands Commute
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The photograph Copper Art 2 both invokes and parodies the idea of the image as powerful. We see almost 50 copper medallions hanging on a Peg-Board (the occasion was a swap meet). Here the artist tweaks mass-culture image making as arbitrary conjuring: a horse or mushroom medallion is presented with the same care, or lack of care, as a Madonna and child. Limbs is a large oil painting of bare branches clustered around an empty center: one is both looking through branches at the sky and at brush strokes no more purposeful than the folds in rumpled bedsheets. Dawn Ship, showing a sunrise at sea and a ship outlined in broad brush strokes suggestive of Chinese painting, both invokes an ancient painterly tradition and seems almost cartoonish.
Such paintings suggest a tension between representation and abstraction, and in his “combinations” McMahon groups paintings and photos in radically different styles. “Combination 23” is made up of ten works. Adjacent to the painterly Composition 2, whose soft shades of gray, blue gray, and green gray reference fine-art abstraction, is the abstract drawing Ask, Throw-Up, whose bulbous shapes recall comic books. The touristy photo Atlantic City Reflection, showing the sun glistening on the sea, is hung next to Texas Road 35 (Nostalgia), an abstracted landscape in broad brush strokes of green and blue. Seeing these works together undercuts the authority of each style, but because landscapes have a common form, the viewer is encouraged to see echoes of each in the others.
The relationship between what we see and what we know is the subject of Insight Out, inspired by a diagram of human sight in an essay by Rene Descartes. The sculptural element consists of wires extending from the outline of a hand, then crossing and ending at an upside-down hand inside a glass bulb, suggesting the way the eye’s lens focuses an upside-down image on the retina. On the rear of the bulb, sandblasted so that it will hold an image, Brown projects a video of herself writing on a blackboard. Her marks are simple vertical strokes, as if she were counting, but occasionally more complex chalk drawings appear: cuneiform signs, a diagram of the Pythagorean theorem. Language and mathematics seem at once invocations of the world and arbitrary games of mark making; by encasing her blackboard imagery within a model of the eye, Brown underlines the dependence of knowledge on subjective human perception.
