| Lara Allen’s work is childish. Not innocent, or simple, or naive, or, heaven forbid, sincere. No. Lara Allen’s work is childish, and in the very best way. It is cheeky, dauntless, rollickingly grim and wholly unburdened by false distinctions. High, low, Christian, heathen, serious, playful, kitsch, sublime: critical taxonomies carry no currency here. Classifications are ersatz niceties that amputate, and Allen prefers the smoky, spooky plenitude of the nightmare, in all of its dreadful glory, to the nightmare of imperious, limping, half-truth. |  |
Lara Allen: Paintings – Daria Jaremko
Lara Allen’s work is childish. Not innocent, or simple, or naive, or, heaven forbid, sincere. No. Lara Allen’s work is childish, and in the very best way. It is cheeky, dauntless, rollickingly grim and wholly unburdened by false distinctions. High, low, Christian, heathen, serious, playful, kitsch, sublime: critical taxonomies carry no currency here. Classifications are ersatz niceties that amputate, and Allen prefers the smoky, spooky plenitude of the nightmare, in all of its dreadful glory, to the nightmare of imperious, limping, half-truth. In her work, t-shirt design, grease paint, motion pictures and images sprung from the Book of Psalms are equivalent—not because she has trained herself in clever juxtapositions, but because she knows, as any wise six year old would, that art, like life, is always a matter of catching as catch can, making do, daring-do: everything is unfair game. Allen also has the presence of mind to remember, and to remind us, that art has never really grown up that much. That, at bottom, the high, low, Christian, heathen, serious, playful, kitsch and sublime are simply the names we give to some of our ways of dispelling the Boogeyman. Allen understands, in a way that most of us have forgotten, that, in order to kill a monster, you don’t deny it exists: you summon it, call it forth into the light since there’s nothing a monster dislikes more than light.
To read Allen’s work as morbid is to misread it. Yes, it’s full of blacks and grays, rife with city blocks on fire and men falling out of the sky, but that doesn’t make it macabre. Not at all. Allen’s work doesn’t glory in disaster; it domesticates disaster, projecting it onto a wall that can’t go anywhere, turning it into an owl smaller than a fist. Allen plays with scale the way she plays with horror: they are things that can be manipulated and mastered because she is willing to maintain a blithe indifference to that dubious thing we call common sense.
Imaginative willfulness, as children know, can transform a blanket into a fort, a box into boat. It can make the prosaic extraordinary. Allen’s work operates on a similar principle, albeit through a looking glass: she refuses to shrink away from the cataclysmic, and, in so doing, makes the awful humdrum. “Look here how bad it was,” each piece says, “Just terrible.” It is. And yet…There she is, there we are, alive, looking, depicting. We’ve confronted a demon and find that we are none the worse for wear. Lara Allen tames calamity not by denying it its devastating power, but by reminding us of our own. It isn’t difficult, Allen insists. It’s only magic. Magic makes you brave enough to give the devil his due and to trounce on his head.
