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Creatures of the Deep MindCreatures at once real, imagined and surreal weave into the grotesquely beautiful paintings of Evelyn Boghrati, showing currently at the Faulkner East Gallery
Creatures great, small, bizarre and mutant can be found circulating in Evelyn Boghrati’s delightfully odd, small exhibition, “Imaginary Worlds,” currently in the Faulkner West Gallery at the downtown Public Library. In her absurd animal kingdom, something feels primordial and possibly the result of biological mishaps or scientific misunderstandings and half truths.
But more to the heart of the artistic matter, these fantastical images put us in mind of the long-standing surrealist instinct in art. By that agenda, rules and rationality are blissfully set into neutral, and the dreamer within is allowed free rein and free range. The results in this case are a curious pleasure to behold, and not your usual Faulkner Gallery fare. The work is painted with fine detail and painterly assurance to help sell the peculiarity of Boghrati’s aesthetic premise. In her artist’s statement, Boghrati explains that while she has pursued other paths in art, in two and three dimensions, this body of work came about when she decided to expand on the innocent, freewheeling energy of her casual “doodles,” to make them writ large and plot-thickened. She realized, after the fact, that she was engaging in the old school “automatism” effect cited by Surrealists and Dadaists of the 1920s, by tapping into the mental impulses and fleeting, random impressions from the subconscious. In other words, she has given shape, color and biomorphic form to fleeting fancies and triggers from non-linear corners of the mind. Given that background, one wonders about the artist’s personal bank of memories, inclinations and desires, and what would lead her to concoct such a phantasmagorical “imaginary world.” But once that question subsides, the viewer sinks into the self-defining spirit of the art itself – We appreciate the identity of the art, rather than speculating about the artist. Mutated creatures abound here, in paintings such as “Swimming Bull” and Chimera-saurus.” A similar hybridizing touch extends to more scenery-based inventions, as in “Flotsam” and “First Encounter,” environments half-drawn from known models in prehistory and the current natural world, and half from inner visions. From a different dimension of the natural world, “Oddity” is an undersea, figurative octopus’ garden. “Harbinger” is a kind of floating compendium of beasts and beast parts, shells, vegetation and disjointed life science fragments. Does the title refer to a harbinger of life forms still-evolving, or a harbinger of a mental, dream-state vision? No easy answers surface here, in art about automatic imagining. Another inviting and slightly creepy piece in the show is “Biomass,” a dense, interwoven pile of uncertain tubular and membranous tissue and tidbits. It is gathered into a globular “biomass” (and perhaps a “bio-mess”), which manages to contain a certain grotesque beauty. Under the surreal circumstances of the exhibition, we might naturally bring a suspicious, ulterior motive-seeking eye to the “straightest” painting in the room, “Trees of Life.” Even in this seemingly innocent, if slightly caricatured portrayal of tree life in nature, we find a hint of a face lurking in a tree trunk’s gnarly burl. We suspect this sneaky personage will have his day in another painting, merged with other beings and animal-world puzzle pieces, as Boghrati’s wonderful, dizzy journey into her lively imagination continues. Santa Barbara News-Press, Scene Magazine, Sept. 23-29, 2011 |