Review featured in
“Might Be Good, Issue 65″
Fantasy life requires a lot of tweaking to assume a communicable form. In Nina Rizzo and Stephanie Wagner’s On the Horizon, currently on view at Art Palace, successful translations of this kind lead viewers to almost believe in the existence of the show’s imaginary landscapes.
Last summer, in Fever at the Creative Research Laboratory, Wagner’s sculpture of a decaying wedding cake showed the wilting of a frilly ideal. In a refiguring of the same concept, the artist’s modified monotypes at Art Palace suspend ideal views of delicate, organic systems. Her All I Need is You, a stunner in silver and sunlight-yellow, posits the growth of a gray mesh in a vaporous atmosphere. Finished portraits of unfinished processes, this set of monotypes explores the inaccessibility of two-dimensional forms as a means of protection for fragile imagery.
Part fortress, part foothill, part ocean liner, even, at times, part whale, the insistent object in Rizzo’s paintings carves architectural space right out of the bright, contextless picture plane. As if photographed under a single-source direct light, the structures gleam like objects with real physical mass. However, the spatial logic of a balcony that leads into a valley, and a ribbon or highway that stretches away from there to a sort of cupola, lack the dependability of linear perspective. No quibbles here: the flux of belief and disbelief enthralls. The paintings coyly suggest a luscious three-dimensional existence that keeps one looking, like the lure of fruit in a Dutch still life.
In a second room, Wagner’s watercolors employ a loopy cartography for sketches of tenuous tropical cities strung wishfully with electric lines. Rizzo counters with tiny, jewel-bright landscapes that do away with obtrusive three-dimensional subjects in a move that favors the paintings as objects in themselves. You wouldn’t carry them around like postcards, but their size invites the comparison.
Like a palm tree on a postcard from Hawaii, the subjects of Rizzo’s and Wagner’s paintings, drawings and prints don’t always satisfy as images: the renderings awaken desire for the impossible realities they portray. This longing for imagined spaces inflects the show with dreamy invocations: on the horizon, once upon a time and in a kingdom by the sea.
Dorothy Meiburg lives in Austin, where she writes essays and poems and works in a public library.