Shotgun Reviews
Devorah Jacoby at Seager Gray Gallery
Shotgun Reviews are an open forum where we invite the international art community to contribute timely, short-format responses to an exhibition or event. If you are interested in submitting a Shotgun Review, please click this link for more information. In this Shotgun Review, Mary Ellen Hannibal reviews Devorah Jacoby: Unearthed at Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley.
Devorah Jacoby. Painter, 2016; oil on canvas; 72 x 60 in. Courtesy of Seager Gray Gallery.
Devorah Jacoby’s new exhibit, Unearthed, expresses the artist’s painterly and conceptual depths mostly in works of oil on canvas. Jacoby’s deep-time backgrounds and her in-the-moment figures create an intersection of temporal and spatial scales. Many of her paintings deploy curiously arrested narratives, which also stop the viewer and provoke reflection.
In Painter, a large portrait of a young woman, palette in hand and a single wing hovering behind her, Jacoby revises Winged Victory (Nike of Samothrace). In contrast to the developed feminine power of the Hellenic sculpture now in the Louvre, Painter has a childlike body and stands firm, but not ready for battle. The figure may lack certainty and direction, but the abstracted background of depth-defying color grounds the viewer. Unattached to the figure’s body, the wing evinces more aspiration than power, yet its complexity (re)assures us that she will fly. A stop-motion quality to the figure suggests time unfolding around her.
In Migrations a confusion of feathers and wings entangles a young male figure. Again the figure’s face is blank but not absent. He seems capable of direction, but not yet ready to muster it. The background of water and sky gives the painting its context and power. More mythic associations come up in Reflections I and Reflections II, both suggesting Narcissus in love with his image in the wading pool. Narcissus lost himself in endless self-reference, but here, especially in Reflections I, the figure’s face opens to an awareness from without. This engagement with the physical world and sensory experience liberates the figure in stark contrast to Narcissus’ traditional fate.
In several paintings, gorgeous blossoms obscure a female face—in Girl with Flowers and Flowers I the figure is evidently burying herself. The flowers are “unearthed,” but not in a positive sense of emergence. These paintings lack the grounding backdrop of View I, where the figure is both looking into and merging with the distant environment (or the background). That distance, with its layers of pigment, texture, and mood, locates Jacoby’s strength in depicting a way-station where the self is not fully revealed, but is fully integrated. Jacoby invokes time unfolding within a provocative moment of aesthetic arrest.
Devorah Jacoby’s Unearthed is on view at Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley, California, through November 17, 2016.
Mary Ellen Hannibal writes about science and culture and lives in the Bay Area; her most recent book is Citizen Scientist.
