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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > October > 15 > Entry
Review: ‘Erin Curtis — Perspective Threshold’
Everything about Erin Curtis’ solo show, ‘Perspective Threshold,’ now at Women & Their Work, is joyfully subversive.
Getting the boot? Two maxims of high modernism: ‘less is more’ and ‘ornament is crime.’
‘Says who?’ Curtis’ work declares.
And while modernist architectural icons figure as the subjects of her paintings — Eero Saarinen’s 1955 General Motors Technical Center, for example — Curtis eschews the restrained modernist palette and goes for crazy, intense colors, her use of acrylic paint adding to the artificiality of the hues.
Curtis’ paintings are giddy critiques. Yes, there’s a cool modernist building somewhere in each of these paintings. But those buildings are not entirely legible, drowned out by a riot of ornament. Planes of busy patterning and vivid decoration — historically dismissed as characteristics of folk art or traditional women’s art — disrupt the cool logic of three-point perspective. Nothing is fixed in place here and everything, especially the pictorial plane, is up for negotiation.
In one of the best recent uses of the sometimes awkward Women and Their Work gallery, Curtis moves her colorful critiques off the wall. Photographs of lush, green foliage are printed on immense swatches of billboard plastic fabric and draped overhead at the entrance to and in one corner of the exhibit. Nature — the plastic kind, that is — threatens to take over here.
And a playhouse-scale facade of a modernist house seems to bust out of one wall and invade several yards into the gallery. Step over the house’s threshold and inside you’ll see fake shadows painted on the interior wall, while cut-outs of Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Barcelona chairs occupy the mini room. Nothing real in here.
Outside the mini house, a pair of mini pool chairs surround a mini pool of flat blue sheet plastic. The mini chairs have an ideal view of a mini billboard that sports ‘Perspectivism,’ a cityscape writ in Curtis’ mishmash of flat planes and shapes that have been jiggered with a festive frenzy of stripes, flowers, diamonds and other patterns and thrown out of axonometric perspective.
Exuberant illusion undermines any expectations of order in Curtis’ universe.
So much for cool logic.
‘Erin Curtis: Perspective Threshold’
Women & Their Work, 1710 Lavaca St.
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays-Fridays, noon to 5 p.m. Saturdays through Nov. 18
www.womenandtheirwork.org
Image: ‘Backwaters’ Erin Curtis
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