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.