Press/ Reviews
2008
Click here to read article about "Relics, Myths and Yarn" on from the Philadelphia Inquirer
Click here to read article about "Relics, Myths and Yarn" on Artdaily.org
Click here to read article about "Relics, Myths and Yarn" on Artknowledgenews.com
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2007
City Paper, November 1-7, 2007, Last Chance
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Moore College of Art & Design Website, October 30, 2007, News Section
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201 Gallery Video by David Kessler, October 2007
www.201gallery.blip.tv Click on The Other Woman (a ladies art collective)
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Click here for the Manufactured Dissent interview with The Other Woman (a ladies art collective)
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Moore News, Issue XXVIII, Fall 2007, From A Gallery of Their Own, p19
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November, 2006
Review of In a Dream by Marc Lombardi
In a Dream
Featuring the Photography of Laura Graham and the Sculpture of Darla Jackson
Moore College of Art - 2006
by Marc Lombardi
A world of new visions from our folkloric past, and a glimpse into the image-rich galaxy that is the source of the universal mythology of humankind
Laura Graham
When reading her artist's statement, it becomes apparent that the template for the construction of Laura Graham's work, in addition to dream imagery, is folk tales: stories honed by the reiterative, evolutionary process of retelling the tale, over the course of time. This timeless feeling permeates the viewer as you take in the beautifully reduced imagery. Slowly, as layers of meaning unfold and the story begins the reveal itself, the viewer becomes aware that he is in the presence of something very different than the type of photographic image that adorns the walls of many art galleries. Graham's photographs vibrate with a combination of strong narrative content and consummate skill which surpass the quality of styles born from mere vérité casualness, or the current practice of indulging in overdone photo manipulations and collages that have become standard in the post-Photoshop world.
At first glance, a piece like "Birdtree" strikes the viewer with the exceptional quality of the elegant reductionist designing, reminiscent of the simplified figurative treatments used by the painter Balthus. But of course these are photographs, not paintings, a fact that is easily forgotten because of the amount of control Graham wields in the process of assembling her carefully tweaked images, costumes, and sets. Like the compression of reality that is found in film, Graham makes every element count. The choice of props like scissors, and wire for string are not just arbitrary decisions of convenience or practicality. Everything is carefully chosen to drive the story home in a very subtle yet powerful way, realized once the viewer becomes sensitive to the language of the media. Also a series of symbolic themes are operating from picture to picture, creating a resonance between the pieces similar to the overtones generated when a chord is stuck on a piano. These thematic commonalities, such as birds on leashes, both taught and slack, and references to motherhood and birth, create stanchions of overarching content that unify the wall of very large photographs. The work is dense with meaning, technically expert, and well presented. In getting to see this early work from Laura Graham, I feel that I am being treated to a preview of the kind of imagery that could have a positive, and maybe profound influence, on the course and scope of contemporary photography.
Darla Jackson
One is immediately struck with the technical skill of the artist, and her knowledge of anatomy when viewing the large scale figurative sculptures of Darla Jackson. The life-size figures, solid and weighty, with the organic integrity of forms built from the inside out, have a slightly rounded finish that brings them away from a purely academic realist statement. Jackson's restrained treatment is reminiscent of the large Neoclassical figures painted by Picasso, midway through his career. These sculptures, however, are much more than skilled works, tastefully simplified. Darla Jackson proceeds with her art making, like an anthropologist, with a humanist agenda. Compelled to understand the complex workings of our fully developed postmodern culture, she reduces it down to its most essential forms. From these kernels, she deliberately isolates the root causes of social problems, as if reserving them for identification and surgical removal, to be seen again only from behind the glass of museum cases, safely separated from the rest of us. She builds objects that represent the progenitors of the existential dilemma, each sculpture revealing a different aspect of the forces at work in the world that separate the individual from the community. Jackson seems familiar with the devices of the surrealists, evident in the Dada-esque superimpositions of "Burden", and the otherworldly quality of the enrobed albatross, wrapped in white gauze, in the figure "Guilt", that evokes the pedigree of the surrealist painter de Chirico, the white wrapping taking on additional aesthetic power, as it is viewed against the white plaster of the sculpted figure.
A series of small sculpted rabbits sit on pedestals in between the large figure sculptures, appearing like a display from some museum of scientific oddities, reminding me of the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. My favorite, a small dark sculpture, representing Brer Rabbit, glistens with viscous shiny black tar (which is really rubber) that dribbles in strands off his mouth and chin. This little sculpture captures perfectly the expression of shock and humiliation that accompanies the misfortune of being a victim of trickery or betrayal.
Both artists have, either by design, or lucky happenstance, connected themselves to a creative wellspring of ideas that reveal the nature of the human condition, through it's perennial stories and elemental pitfalls. Both Jackson and Graham are explorers, conceptually adventuring into the frontier of the subconscious, and either knowingly or unknowingly, recovering the trail blazed by earlier investigators of human consciousness, such as Colin Wilson, and Carl Jung. As if to provide evidence for the show's alignment with Jungian ideas, synchronicities between the sculptures and photographs became apparent, realized only after the work of both artists was installed. The whole show fed back on itself like a recursive wave of meaning accumulating inside the circuits of some metaphoric amplifier of artistic content. The artwork was very visually compatible, both artists limiting themselves to black and white. This created a tonal relationship that, along with the thematic commonalities, made the show take on an air of inevitability, looking as if the work was always meant to be seen together, like fraternal twins, separated at birth. House symbols were shared between Jackson's and Graham's work, although each artist developed this symbolic content independently. One of Darla Jackson's rabbit sculptures, "The Path of Pins or the Path of Needles", coincidentally reflected the realm of Laura Graham's folk story themes by referencing Little Red Ridinghood's archaic incarnation, which includes dicey content about the false choices offered to women of this time, passages that were omitted from the familiar version of this children's story as we hear it told today. By obscuring the faces of her life-size figures, Jackson, added a universal quality to the work, an aesthetic device also employed by Graham in her photographs. This device, shared between the three dimensional sculptures and the two dimensional photographs, functioned as an additional unifying element, further connecting the work of the two women. The Artists developed almost a moiré pattern of looping-back themes, symbols, and aesthetic choices, creating a web of relationships, that knitted the individual work into a powerful organic whole, achieving for Jackson and Graham what is the ultimate goal for any artist involved with showing in groups: that the show gain strength as a result of the synergistic power that is created when the work of the individual supports the aspirations of the team.
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