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Beasts with human faces
Kate Javens at Schmidt Dean Gallery
Kate Javens’s new work explores the animal kingdom. Her depictions of a green darner exude a placid, almost text-book-like air. They are executed with a limited palette of colors on theater muslin, which lends them the quality of illustrations.
Her studies of the green darner and various ram’s heads are all quite exact and really don’t prepare you for the disturbing fantasia of her two "Father Ram" pieces. The larger is 66” x 106” on theater muslin, and the colors are limited to shades of brown; but by replacing the ram’s face with an androgynous human face, Javens creates a most disturbing image, calling up atavistic fears of the commingling of species. On one hand it reminds me of the ancient Assyrians’ bull- and lion-headed sculptures— figures of mythic power. Yet Javens’s creation is at rest, threatening no one.
I suppose the admixture of human and animal always creates a frisson—isn’t that the power of the werewolf figure and (in more recent times) the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger’s Alien? Perhaps we humans fear the creation of a manufactured super-species that will supplant us as naturally as the house cat supplants the house hamster. Yet Javens presents Father Ram as neither deity nor fiend. It simply exists, placidly lying there, inviting your gaze. And after meeting Father Ram, the Green Darner is a pure delight.
Sharing wall space with Javens’s strong creations is a rather neutral group show of Schmidt Dean-affiliated photographers. The works include a pair of wondrous large landscapes by Ida Weygandt that are themselves worth the trip. They’re almost novelistic in their concentrated detail. Her Thicket, in particular, is a novella waiting to be written.
Her studies of the green darner and various ram’s heads are all quite exact and really don’t prepare you for the disturbing fantasia of her two "Father Ram" pieces. The larger is 66” x 106” on theater muslin, and the colors are limited to shades of brown; but by replacing the ram’s face with an androgynous human face, Javens creates a most disturbing image, calling up atavistic fears of the commingling of species. On one hand it reminds me of the ancient Assyrians’ bull- and lion-headed sculptures— figures of mythic power. Yet Javens’s creation is at rest, threatening no one.
I suppose the admixture of human and animal always creates a frisson—isn’t that the power of the werewolf figure and (in more recent times) the Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger’s Alien? Perhaps we humans fear the creation of a manufactured super-species that will supplant us as naturally as the house cat supplants the house hamster. Yet Javens presents Father Ram as neither deity nor fiend. It simply exists, placidly lying there, inviting your gaze. And after meeting Father Ram, the Green Darner is a pure delight.
Sharing wall space with Javens’s strong creations is a rather neutral group show of Schmidt Dean-affiliated photographers. The works include a pair of wondrous large landscapes by Ida Weygandt that are themselves worth the trip. They’re almost novelistic in their concentrated detail. Her Thicket, in particular, is a novella waiting to be written.
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