Not a Soul in Sight
By Christina Vassallo
Echo Eggebrecht, Totem, acrylic on panel, 18 x 24 inches, courtesy Sixtyseven Gallery
Oh, but you will, the first solo show of painter Echo Eggebrecht, was on display recently at the new Chelsea location of Sixtyseven Gallery. Eggebrecht’s ambivalent array of haunting and cheerful images transformed the stark white walls of the shiny new gallery space into a haze of blurry memories and almost-forgotten details.
Eggebrecht’s images display a seamless combination of painterly technique and graphic design. Her visual themes are borrowed from the comforting fixtures of Americana, like embroidered dish cloths, icons of the Southwest, and quilt patterns. The sky in Stars and Stripes is an obsessively rendered homage to the American flag; the over-grown, pattered grass in The Picnic could be mistaken for a detail of a granny quilt square. Totem, in which the modeled crests of a totem pole are set against colorful rolling clouds and a flat lime-green background, is the culmination of the visual tension that results from the artist’s combinations of flat and varied surfaces.
Despite the familiarity of Eggebrecht’s allusions, the acrylic paintings take on a spooky sense of abandonment, resembling theater sets after the actors have left, the emotion has been drained from the stage and the clean up crew has yet to strike it. This is partly a result of her technique: she constructs miniature models and then transfers the scene into paint on birch panel.. The stillness of Snake in the Grass, for instance, is like the soft exhale of air after a tremendous explosion of dramatic energy. The starless black sky looming over a backyard scene seems straightforward–almost anti-climactic–at first glance, but the odd placement of a harpoon and garden hose near an aboveground pool creates a theatrical mystery. It is as if someone at sometime had done something, but the legacy of that action is impossible to find.
The only signs of human intervention in these paintings are the comforts in which Eggebrecht’s non-existent all-American characters indulge themselves, such as backyard games, picnics, and firework displays. In Birdie, two badminton racquets are strewn on the ground as shooting stars fall overhead. An intriguing, small globe is deposited on the badminton court, lending the painting a sense of foreboding, hinting at an impending catastrophe. Eggebrecht’s ominous details raise more questions than they answer, like the lollipops that are scattered under a dangling piñata in Frontier. The deserted candies promote thoughts of a sudden fiasco in order to justify their appearance in the painting. Eggebrecht ties in this visual clue of neglect and desolation to the larger concept of Manifest Destiny at play in this painting, hinted at by the title of the work.
The paintings in Oh, but you will are simultaneously inviting and repellent. They show the comfort of everyday activities in a grim light and maintain a perfect balance of familiarity and strangeness. The complexity of Eggebrecht’s paintings are surpassed only by their subtle bizarreness.
