I grew up going to the beach in Galveston—usually on the west end of the island, but sometimes on the east end or on Bolivar Peninsula. These beaches were historically dirty, the water was murky and opaque, and used to be covered with jellyfish corpses. Compared to other beaches, Galveston’s are decidedly unbeautiful. But in memory they are idyllic. That feeling of a waterside idyll is present in Joey Faurso’s exhibit I Wish I Had A River at the Galveston Arts Center.
Unlike Fauerso’s figures, I have never sat naked by the river. Way too self-conscious.
The images in this exhibit are largely monochromatic. Faurso’s figures are stylized. They are proportioned correctly, but lack detail, and are drawn with thick outlines. They are expressionist bathers.
One figure is repeated many times throughout these works. This is a woman laying on her back. She appears dozens of times in the piece called Floating Without Worrying, as well in the painting Flotation Device. So based on these titles, one could imagine that she is floating on her back in the water, but her posture is too rigid to be a convincing floater. She appears to be laying flat on her back on something solid; she is portrayed from the side.
In a way, these figures seem somewhat primitive, like relief carvings of human figures from the bronze age. Very few of her figures exist in ¾ views, or seen from above or at an angle.
When I saw these artworks, I was reminded of the paintings of German expressionists from the early 20th century, For instance, look at Bathers at Moritzburg by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (painted between 1909 and 1926). The lakes at Moritzburg were a popular place for expressionists and other socially adventurous people to practice nudism. Kirchner went there often and frequently painted nude sunbathers.
The title of the exhibit is a quote from the Joni Mitchell song “River,” but Mitchell wasn’t wishing she had a river to sunbathe on the banks of—she was singing about iced-over Canadian rivers from the nostalgic point of view of a immigrant to Los Angeles. But I see Fauerso as imagining river rat life in Texas, with people hanging out on and in the river. But is there trouble in paradise?
In the images, there are in addition to idyllic images of relaxation, there are images of danger. Flotation Device has Fauerso’s prone female figure surrounded by a frame of alligators. This arrangement of visual elements feels more decorative than a depiction of actual danger. The alligators have no apparent connection to the human figures—they are a graphic element.
But there are also boxes which seem to envelope and split images of the figures. The boxes are three-dimensional elements on top if the painted images. They are just the framework of a box—they are not solid rectangular objects. But even though we can see through them, the painting figures are inexplicably obscured by the boxes.
In the artist’s statement, Fauerso is described as having been inspired by the history of magic tricks that involve a woman’s body, often referred to as “torture Illusions”. Think of sawing a woman in half.
This notion of “torture illusions” is displayed in the sculpture Superposition. A three-dimensional image of a cat is sliced in two in two wire-frame boxes. One might think of “torture illusions” when one sees it, but I thought of Schrödinger's cat, the thought experiment used to explain the concept in quantum mechanics called superposition. The idea is that a particle doesn’t have a definite state of being until it is measured. Schrödinger’s thought experiment had the life of a cat in an opaque box dependent on the state of a radioactive particle, which according to quantum mechanics exists in multiple states until it is observed. Fauerso imagines this experiment happening with a transparent box, so we see the demise of the cat. So the superposition of the state of the cat being simultaneously alive and dead is not fulfilled in this version of the experiment. As the Munchkin coroner said in the Wizard of Oz, “She is not merely dead; she is most sincerely dead.” .
Fauerso’s other stated influences were feminist thinker Iris Marion Young and French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I don’t know enough about either of them to relate their thought to the art in I Wish I Had a River. But since they are mentioned in the artist’s statement, I figure they were knocking around in Fauerso’s skull as she painted these sunbathing hedonists. The connection seems obscure to me, but I attribute that mostly to my own ignorance.
This is an excerpt from Warm Ups, described as a work in progress. I have no idea what relation it has with the other work in this exhibit, but I like seeing Fauerso’s jerky animation. It sits just outside the main gallery where all the sunbathers and torture illusion victims reside. It is the first work you see of I Wish I Had A River.
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