The Ironton Blog

This video of her upcoming exhibit is as beautiful as it is descriptive. Artists often shy away from letting people see works in progress, Brenda makes it an art in itself. The show opens Friday February 20th.

Monique Crine works in photography and photo-realistic oil painting with subject matter ranging from what appear to be off-the-cuff snapshots to painstakingly constructed portraiture. Over the past five years she has explored the complexities of gender roles, familial relations, and the psychological interiority of her subjects. The individuals in her images—with minor exceptions they are nearly always single figures—are most often members of Crine’s immediate circle of friends and family. Yet Crine’s closeness to her subjects has not resulted in overgenerous, saccharine images. On the contrary Crine levels a penetrating gaze at her subjects that extracts them from the inaccessible status of personal subject matter placing them instead like still lifes amid the darkening drama that is contemporary American life.

One idea I found myself returning to when looking at Monique Crines paintings is the familiar. These paintings are indeed familiar in the sense that the images Crine constructs make use of certain tropes within the North American popular imagination, particularly those images of the West we have received through films such as John Ford’s The Searchers, or Martin Ritt’s 1963 film, Hud. Unlike forms of painting that propose a knowing side-long glance from within the esoteric discourse of painting-as-painting, Crine’s choice of imagery—more particularly of the language of cinematography most evident in her use of the “rule of thirds” for medium shots, and centralizing the figure in “close-ups”—speak to us in the shared language of cinema. Rather than painting or still photography, Crine’s actual medium is the arrested cinematic image.

Anyone familiar with American Westerns will find the depictions in “Tony James” oddly familiar. In one particularly striking image Tony James, the subject and protagonist of Crine’s cycle of paintings, is silhouetted by sunlight that streams into the mouth of a dark tunnel. This image unmistakably quotes the final scene of The Searchers, but Crine has replaced John Wayne’s melancholic, aging, civil war veteran with a young soldier just returned from duty in Iraq. The figure stands at the mouth of the tunnel and appears to be turning back to look at us. It is tempting to think of this image as indicative of a dying or dead form of laborer, the ramblin’ cowhand. Instead the young men who might have once occupied this social position are now soldiers at the far boarders of American Empire.

We see Tony spending his time in fleeting pleasures, a beer in hand, smoking a cigarette, the passing light of an afternoon sun. He doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself. He looks nervous, sour, and sad. Given our current economic crisis and the American wars abroad, these moments of leisurely consumption can be read as reminders that the forms of freedom this Marlboro Man once represented now contain as much substance and promise as the glare of sunlight on a camera lens, or a passing cloud of exhaled smoke.

In the care with which Crine attends to the framing of her figures she shows how individuals are enmeshed within the dialectic of identity, as both the creators and as the effects of spectacularized and reified identities. (Hence my reference to the mythic Marlboro Man.) This is not to say that Crine’s paintings are caricatures—type and caricature, often confused with one another, occupy two different yet critical roles within the history of graphic representation. Crine does not resort to the satirical use of caricature, but her use of “type” is perhaps the distant child of social analysis and factographic photography that perceived individuals as indicative of broader social phenomena.

The stock character Crine’s paintings present is certainly strong and silent, but exceeding this trope are the historical status and the personal future of Tony James, both of which are certainly uncertain.

Anthony Graves is a NY based artist, his work can be see at anthonygraves.net

Michael Paglia writes:
Painter Andy Berg, a resident artist at Ironton Studios, is presenting his latest creations in an exhibit there titled Rebirth of the Deity. Berg believes that his paintings originate in the deep recesses of his mind and that his actual brushstrokes are guided by forces unknown to him. This approach, called automatism, is associated with the abstract expressionists, but Berg says his work is also different from most artists who work in this style. “I don’t want to call myself an abstract expressionist,” Berg says, “but I think that Pollock and those guys in the ’50s were really on to something.”

Read the rest at http://www.westword.com/events/andy-berg-rebirth-of-the-deity-1861126/

Ironton is pleased to host artist and former Denverite Jan Johnson for a solo show. The exhibit opens to the public on Friday, February 25th with the artist in attendance one night only! An important figure in Denver’s art scene for many years, Jan returns from Portland to show a series of paintings entitled Flora & Fauna.

Opening reception Friday February 25th, from 6-10 pm