"Califonian Idyll"
January 6 - February 3, 2007
| biography |
Surfers #1
36" x 18"
Surfer
48" x 48"
Strawberry Pickers #1
42" x 24"
Tents in the Woods #1
48" x 36"
Amy Bird
Amy Bird's paintings of surfers capture a distinctly Californian idyll. Her paintings of field laborers, while equally specific, are rooted in an entirely different reality. They hang as counterweights to one another, caught and balanced in a dialectic of leisure and labor, of boundless play and bounded toil.
While the surfer and strawberry picker paintings circle around a series of contradictions central to imaginings of California, nowhere do they accommodate cliché: Heaven or hell? Sunshine or noir? Bird's California landscapes occupy a far more uncertain terrain. The paintings take the contradictions of the place as their very subject, tracing the network of relations that generate the social and political landscape of the Golden State. The leisure of the coast is enabled and supported by the labor of the interior. The landscape is never simply natural, but always an economic or ideological construct-imagined, invented, imposed, and projected.
Bird's paintings are mostly monochromatic. Flattened out, voided, drained of all affect, Bird's surfer and field worker paintings are evocative but wholly subdued, almost vacant. The figures are at once clearly defined but also fugitive and immaterial, threatening to give way to the ground against which they are painted, to disappear entirely as they slide into their surround.
If the surfer and field worker pictures are observations of a present day paradox, Bird's paintings of tents in the woods contain their own opposition of past and present within a single frame. In these paintings, canvas tents float as luminous bodies on vertical bars of chromatically specific forest colors. The registration of dappled sunlight is done as line work that becomes lace-like in its complexity. These un-peopled mountain encampments trouble our notions of the wilderness as a site of recreation by reminding us of a time when the American West was fearsome and wild, and camping was not an activity of leisure but a hardship imposed by circumstance. The work's relationship to historical Western landscape painting is further bolstered by a series of watercolors based on American Sublime master paintings.
Amy Bird grew up in Ojai, California. She received her BA in painting from Dartmouth College and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited her work in LA, Boston, Providence, and Maine. She lives and works in Studio City, California.
Painter Amy Bird's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles features three bodies of work, each influenced by graphic design and sporting a pastel, natural-tone palette. The smooth brushwork, crisp figurative contours, and fluid gradients in these paintings recall the oneiric, horizonless landscapes of Yves Tanguy. Seven blue or green monochromatic paintings in the first room emulate overexposed photographs in which detail is blown out, leaving only the flat silhouettes of figures in landscapes. In Surfers #1, 2004, surfers and beachgoers, some of the inordinate number of locals who mysteriously don't need day jobs, bask in Southern California's endless summer. Though aesthetically congruous with Surfers #1, paintings like Strawberry Pickers #3, 2005, feature another iconic yet much less idyllic figure from the regional landscape: the day laborer. In Strawberry Pickers #6, 2005, contours of migrant workers bent over in the field gracefully (if somewhat academically) evoke Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners, 1857. The perverse dichotomy of the Los Angeles population runs counter to Bird's consistent aesthetic, and class divisions are amplified through the juxtaposition of leisure and labor classes. A hunched-over figure combing for shells in the sand parallels one hunched over while picking strawberries. The back room of the gallery features seven paintings of tents in a forest. Inspired by the summer-camp ambience of Bird's alma mater, the Thatcher School in Ojai, these paintings are equally meticulous in their design and present a Jorge Pardo–meets–John Muir impression of the transcendental woods. The darker palette and conspicuous absence of figures positions these works as a contemplative space of reprieve from the city—or the crop field—in which to consider the how and why of daily life and one's relationship to the environment.
—Micol Hebron (artforum.com)
In Amy Bird's paintings, silhouettes of surfers and farm workers melt into common natural surroundings, ebbing and flowing in human waves along the California coast in search of endless summer and an end to poverty. - KB
-flavorpill LA (http://la.flavorpill.net)
Amy Bird's paintings of surfers capture a distinctly Californian idyll. Her paintings of field laborers, while equally specific, are rooted in an entirely different reality. They hang as counterweights to one another, caught and balanced in a dialectic of leisure and labor, of boundless play and bounded toil.
While the surfer and strawberry picker paintings circle around a series of contradictions central to imaginings of California, nowhere do they accommodate cliché: Heaven or hell? Sunshine or noir? Bird's California landscapes occupy a far more uncertain terrain. The paintings take the contradictions of the place as their very subject, tracing the network of relations that generate the social and political landscape of the Golden State. The leisure of the coast is enabled and supported by the labor of the interior. The landscape is never simply natural, but always an economic or ideological construct-imagined, invented, imposed, and projected.
Bird's paintings are mostly monochromatic. Flattened out, voided, drained of all affect, Bird's surfer and field worker paintings are evocative but wholly subdued, almost vacant. The figures are at once clearly defined but also fugitive and immaterial, threatening to give way to the ground against which they are painted, to disappear entirely as they slide into their surround.
If the surfer and field worker pictures are observations of a present day paradox, Bird's paintings of tents in the woods contain their own opposition of past and present within a single frame. In these paintings, canvas tents float as luminous bodies on vertical bars of chromatically specific forest colors. The registration of dappled sunlight is done as line work that becomes lace-like in its complexity. These un-peopled mountain encampments trouble our notions of the wilderness as a site of recreation by reminding us of a time when the American West was fearsome and wild, and camping was not an activity of leisure but a hardship imposed by circumstance. The work's relationship to historical Western landscape painting is further bolstered by a series of watercolors based on American Sublime master paintings.
Amy Bird grew up in Ojai, California. She received her BA in painting from Dartmouth College and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited her work in LA, Boston, Providence, and Maine. She lives and works in Studio City, California.
Painter Amy Bird's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles features three bodies of work, each influenced by graphic design and sporting a pastel, natural-tone palette. The smooth brushwork, crisp figurative contours, and fluid gradients in these paintings recall the oneiric, horizonless landscapes of Yves Tanguy. Seven blue or green monochromatic paintings in the first room emulate overexposed photographs in which detail is blown out, leaving only the flat silhouettes of figures in landscapes. In Surfers #1, 2004, surfers and beachgoers, some of the inordinate number of locals who mysteriously don't need day jobs, bask in Southern California's endless summer. Though aesthetically congruous with Surfers #1, paintings like Strawberry Pickers #3, 2005, feature another iconic yet much less idyllic figure from the regional landscape: the day laborer. In Strawberry Pickers #6, 2005, contours of migrant workers bent over in the field gracefully (if somewhat academically) evoke Jean-Francois Millet's The Gleaners, 1857. The perverse dichotomy of the Los Angeles population runs counter to Bird's consistent aesthetic, and class divisions are amplified through the juxtaposition of leisure and labor classes. A hunched-over figure combing for shells in the sand parallels one hunched over while picking strawberries. The back room of the gallery features seven paintings of tents in a forest. Inspired by the summer-camp ambience of Bird's alma mater, the Thatcher School in Ojai, these paintings are equally meticulous in their design and present a Jorge Pardo–meets–John Muir impression of the transcendental woods. The darker palette and conspicuous absence of figures positions these works as a contemplative space of reprieve from the city—or the crop field—in which to consider the how and why of daily life and one's relationship to the environment.
—Micol Hebron (artforum.com)
In Amy Bird's paintings, silhouettes of surfers and farm workers melt into common natural surroundings, ebbing and flowing in human waves along the California coast in search of endless summer and an end to poverty. - KB
-flavorpill LA (http://la.flavorpill.net)