| Labor-intensive drawings fool the eye and fascinate. A slowly executed trompe l’oeil pencil drawing might at first appear to be a quickly executed, gestural painting. These images explore authenticity as material, and this theme is emphasized by the creation of landscapes such as described by J.G. Ballard. They are both banal and terrifying in their exploration of a hideous future. What ever happened to Abbott and Costello? The plot of many B Movies will follow a group of individuals as they barricade themselves into a smaller and smaller space. The threat beyond the barricade is clearly a preposterous fiction: zombies, mutants, or sleeping monsters stirred into anger. |  |
Jane Millican
Labor-intensive drawings fool the eye and fascinate. A slowly executed trompe l’oeil pencil drawing might at first appear to be a quickly executed, gestural painting. These images explore authenticity as material, and this theme is emphasized by the creation of landscapes such as described by J.G. Ballard. They are both banal and terrifying in their exploration of a hideous future. What ever happened to Abbott and Costello?
The plot of many B Movies will follow a group of individuals as they barricade themselves into a smaller and smaller space. The threat beyond the barricade is clearly a preposterous fiction: zombies, mutants, or sleeping monsters stirred into anger. Inside the barricade, the action more closely resembles reality. The individuals repeatedly construct and adapt both their physical environment and their common narrative in a desperate effort to frame their latest reality, and organize themselves into a model of society that might allow them all to survive. The best B movies will include awkward actors, wobbling sets, hair in the lens or visible microphones, which frequently interrupt the narrative and remind the viewer that they are simply consuming a hastily produced, cut-price product. Similar events might be a code for recognizing realism and reportage, or perhaps be Brechtian devices, deliberately confounding an audience’s comfortable identification. The material facts of production can rupture fictions, shatter illusions, and reveal a more fundamental reality, and in that same moment, a new narrative begins.
Within an exhibition space, when one is looking at a painting, the brush marks are the most compelling interruption. They are facts; they exist before and after interpretation, and they are there in the moment when paint supplants the scene it describes and the script is forgotten. Drawing a painting is perhaps extending and examining this act of looking in the moment just before the physical material of paint is displaced by narrative and illusion.
These drawings begin, far away from the production and consumption of art, by the artist walking the periphery of a small city, at the edge of a country, on a tiny little island. Here material facts are harder to grasp, and can barely be glimpsed through a multitude of narratives that would each be sensible only within the reassuringly shoddy and artificial frame of a B Movie. In this moment, muddling genres by introducing a silly hat and a sarcastic aside, delivered straight to the camera, should trigger the fade into interlude.
