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Beneath a pyramid that defines Etherton Gallery’s central entryway to its exhibition space, Bailey Doogan’s painting of a naked woman floats. She does so in the way one might in a pool of water; head thrown back, arms outstretched, legs bending in where the buoyancy keeps them from straightening or realizing a seating. Entitled Ex Cathedra this woman speaks; not from the ex cathedra seat of infallibility but from the universal magisterium of popes and Catholic bishops. |
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Beneath a pyramid that defines Etherton Gallery’s central entryway to its exhibition space, Bailey Doogan’s painting of a naked woman floats. She does so in the way one might in a pool of water; head thrown back, arms outstretched, legs bending in where the buoyancy keeps them from straightening or realizing a seating. Entitled Ex Cathedra this woman speaks; not from the ex cathedra seat of infallibility but from the universal magisterium of popes and Catholic bishops. She speaks in a space where her light, imbued flesh is suspended in an ecstasy of ephemeral stases: vulnerable and mortal; unauthorable and vocal; silently ululating in a provisional place that potentially gives rise to unrest or that may remain a cry outside of time, depending on your point of view.
Seen in a rare fusion of public (The Tucson Museum of Art) and private venues (Etherton Gallery), Doogan’s widely received 2005-2006, 30-year retrospective exhibition gave rise to repeated visits that were accompanied by a range of viewer responses ranging from nascent recognition to discomfort, disgust, shock and, yes, awe.
For many, viewing Doogan’s figurative paintings and drawings is personally uncomfortable—the private becomes public, the nude becomes naked. As she says, “I’m dealing with the naked body rather than the nude. In art, the nude is the Subject, and viewers want the nude.” Drawing from life, Doogan moves in on the body, hers in particular, calling into question how a woman is supposed to look, and at what age; at any given time, what does 40, or 50, or 60 look like? The veiled hues, the quality of flesh and fold, vein and sinew, wrinkles and scars rendered in layer upon layer of translucent pigmentation further Doogan’s articulation of processes, in body and in being. Speaking through the layers of the customary representations of the nude as an art form, she continues to expand her repertoire of imagery so that beauty and the language of the body are synonymous at any age.
Doogan disrupts inhabited conventions and works to recreate those objectified images of women in the Olympic-sized reflecting pool of Western Art. She doesn’t gaze in the placid pool of the idealized past, but instead throws stones, sending ripples as she examines and reveals societal and subjective concerns about aging, gender relationships and private rituals of self-examination. Her subjective scrutiny came into play in North Carolina in early 2003, where she was a teaching resident the day US fighter jets started bombing Baghdad. As a response to the nation’s recognition of an act of war, Doogan returned to her part on the whole. She began Self Exam in Nation, four six-foot-tall charcoal drawings of her naked body.
Each body emerges from the darkness, a figural tapestry imbued with celestial light. Doogan’s drawing process is “reductive;” she pulls light out of the dark by sanding a charcoal surface off of primed, heavy paper. Each body is a masterful rendering of gesture that occurs through the act of drawing to define a reality all its own. These highly corporeal bodies bend, lift and pull, pinching and squeezing—examining a foot, a hip, a thigh, a heavy breast—with gestures that are so familiar one can feel the skin, see the incidental bruise, scar, stretch mark or callous. Real or imagined it is in the flesh, the sense memory that marks us all.
It is through this larger-than-life work that Doogan’s anxious self-examination evolved into an act-up-speak-out improvisational reaction to the then impending war. Breathing through her materialized reference to the landscape of our time, Doogan’s highly emotive figures are imbued with a psychological charge. As with all her works, Self Exam in Nation is a visual analogue to the interactive themes of social and personal experience that modify and redefine what it is to be in this century.
