Inside a Dreamtime Tattoo
Shelley F. Marlowe
"The supernatural contacts ecstasy . . ."
—Barbara Guest
In this first solo show, Shelley Marlowe uses imagery from myths—snakes, Medusa—but adapts the icons in a way that violates their standard usage shattering assumptions and expectations. The symbols don't fit the roles we're used to consigning them to. They don't stand for the same restrictive ideas. It's time to liven up the maelstrom. In creating new contexts for her snake images, in reversing the Medusa imagery (human heads on snake appendages), Marlowe creates a new landscape. It's a landscape of mystical imagery finessed with cave-drawing urgency, the process of denoting immediate response gets priority over the fashioning of an interpretation or embellishment. We're participating in magic and mystery here. These works aren't decorative fantasies addressed to pleasuring or comforting. They're potent screams.
She conjures auras of brutal forces in transition, forming themselves. Her swirls fill the void in whose center an image is surfacing long enough for our glimpse. Hers is a language of fragmentation where hints are staged: objects (hands, snakes) apart from their usual referents, appear in the surface stew challenging us to make our own associations. She provides ingredients for our inferences.
At times her images look like cell structures, something you see under a microscope. They're suggestive, imaginative, poetic and convince by hinting at rather than blatantly stating. Like dreams that suggest more than delineate, her fantasies rise from the stream of thought that continually changes, replenishing itself with its vocabulary of sensory data and memory.
On her rectangular surfaces (oil on paper), defiant tone corrals her fragments. The bold swirls are a passionate gesture, angry finger painting, a rebellious code of striking out, a working out of feelings stirred and uncontainable anymore. She's playful but not kidding.
Her light is the light after a bad tornado. It's a light that comes from a great distance as when you die. Her colors are dark, stormy, and psychedelic: aquamarines, muddy red-browns but eased with a lot of surface white. Her surface is resonant and thick and scraped contributing to the ghostly, menacing effects.
The anger visible and the eagerness to explore these feelings refreshes and empowers. Accepting the feelings allows a growth past the forces—family, myth—that have for too long worked to keep us "behaved." We've been compliant and have suppressed our emotions, hidden away, for too long. No more.
Trial Balloon is a new gallery in operation since last February. According to its director and sole employee, Nicola Tyson, it functions as a project space presenting the work of women not related by any particular style. Rather than building up a stable of artists, Tyson sees the gallery as a springboard for the artists she shows. Unlike many other non-commercial venues, the space is large, comfortable, and shows the work off to best effect.
(With thanks to Mitch Highfill and Kim Lyons)
(Cover, December 1992)