On Virgin Land: Ali Fitzgerald at Art Palace On View through January 4, 2006
Viewers with puritan sensibilities should avoid On Virgin Land, Ali Fitzgerald’s solo show at Art Palace, on view through January 4. For the rest of us, the exhibition will elicit a few primal ye-haw’s. Western-themed paintings wrap Art Palace’s central gallery and become something of an all-around installation experience of Wild Bill (and Wild Willimina) burlesque. Be warned, it can be hard not to blush when you look closely at what’s going on in these paintings.
From couched innuendos to hidden salacious captions, Fitzgerald gives her viewer a lot to find. A painted caravan of covered wagons circles the gallery at floor-level and script letters spell out an overtly sexual subtext. Their message points out that the female protagonist in Orgasmic Annie Sallies Forth (2005) is about to climax. The reader raises her eyes to find Annie, a nearly life-sized figure, flipped beneath her horse and hanging on with only her legs. You can bet the ranch that Annie turns more than just rodeo tricks. A few canvases over in Vamping Boss Lady Velma (2005), another of Fitzgerald’s femme fatales, this one more Nordic-looking than western, introduces herself to viewers breasts first. Her name appears across her bikini top like a waitress’s name on a uniform with “Peggy” on one breast and “Sue” on the other. Even Poker Alice, the card-playing matriarch who appears on the show’s invitation (see …mbg issue 49), seems more promiscuous in the context of Fitzgerald’s oeuvre than in the annals of early-American history. In the side gallery, a selection of drawings (pencil and paint on paper) seem more salable than scintillating, but the work we have come to expect from Fitzgerald—the big girls with the big guns—are as raucous as ever.
A few of the pieces in On Virgin Land are reminiscent of work by Kara Walker, an artist Fitzgerald admires. Though Fitzgerald works in polychrome and Walker uses silhouettes, both prefer wall-sized work and use traditional forms to articulate socially progressive views. The exhibition also has the feel of one of Mathew Ritchie’s intricately constructed fictional universes. Like Ritchie, Fitzgerald clearly has spent some time researching the figures she pokes fun at and apotheosizes. But, unlike Ritchie, she doesn’t provide a textual resource to accompany journeyers on their tour. It’s a shame that so much of the narratives that drive the work escape us, but there is ample visual material to keep gallery goers occupied. A basic knowledge of pop culture and classical mythology is sometimes all one needs to clinch a painting’s meaning. In a canvas mounted to the floor the twin sons of Mars forego the she-wolf to suckle revolver tips. The full flamboyant title of the work is Michaela Had Two Guns, Cletus and Remus Suckled from Them Until Their Lil’ Bellies Were Filled with Lead (2005). Above Cletus and Remus, The Temptation of St. Clint (of Eastwood) (2005) looks down approvingly from the ceiling.
Comprising roughly six-months work, On Virgin Land shows only one piece that viewers might have seen before: Tommy-Faye Buffalo, Heyra Hankshaw and the Cowering Cowboy Castrati from Gallery 3 at the Co-op’s exhibition No Place Like Home. Nevertheless, the works are starting to look familiar. And this, I think, is the first sign that Fitzgerald will turn the tables on us. I shared this observation to the artist about a week after her show opened and she concurred. The West has been won. It’s over. The only guarantee we have from Fitzgerald is that her new work will chart virgin territory. She seems to have ruled out minimalism, which she thinks would torment her soul, but all other styles and subjects are fair game. For the time being, enjoy this impressive body of work at the Art Palace, and please, keep the kids away from the phallic cactuses on the floor.
http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/issue58.htm
