“Mitosis: Felicity Nove at CMay Gallery”, by James Scarborough
June 28, 2018
"If you are only moved by color relationships, you are missing the point. I am interested in expressing the big emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom." Mark Rothko
INTRODUCTION. 11 poured pigment and resin on aluminum paintings and one site-specific installation. The paintings are large; they engulf the viewer. Everything’s red. Everything quivers, pulsates, and throbs. Gravity would continue the shapes’ voyage down the wall, but they seem frozen in a moment of arrested flux. Smooshed on a slide to view under a microscope, perhaps.
The shapes, organic; again, seemingly the product of gravity. There are family resemblances. A single red form, Metaphase: Sister Chromatids conventions of her gender #42 (That’s the title; They’re all poetic; some as if pulled from a Margaret Atwood novel). Match it with Bowing to their elders the formless shape emerged was it an artifact or a jawbone?/The space between articulated only by the resonance of their arabesque song. The former, a bleeding apostrophe (an unfinished quote), melting, morphing, in-process of something. The way imagined wind plays with the folds of the Winged Victory of Samothrace’s gown. The latter, pulled apart, dangled tendrils, bloody quotation marks (a finished quote), post-process, as if the former was rent apart to form the latter.
The freeze-framed effect chills you. Blood splatter shapes, evidence of, it seems, large scale violence. Sizzly red but not monochromatic, the surface roils, to some purpose, with activity. What purpose, what activity? How about cell division? More, specifically, mitosis. A single cell becomes two daughter cells to promote body health at the cellular level. Inspiration, then, comes at the microscopic level, scaled up jillions of times to form these jarring, biological narratives.
WHAT’S IT ABOUT? More than biological narratives, though, the work becomes a metaphor for chronic stress’ effect on the body or, in more general terms, the body politic. This interest in biological processes comes from a specific source. The 2016 US Presidential election. The works’ inspiration, then, is political, but not the way you think it is. Nove’s response to the tumultuous campaign and subsequent reign inspired her to examine how stress, politically-induced or not, impacts the human body. Her research found how chronic stress inhibits mitosis which, in turn, frustrates the body’s ability to ward off disease. In other words, stress sucks. But you know that already.
Perhaps you didn’t know, though, that Nove’s displayed work is political art, in implied reference if not in explicit content. Let’s call it biopolitical art for the way that it sublimates anxiety and stress.
WHY DOES IT MATTER? Political art can be about catharsis. (Think of two 1937 images: Pablo Picasso’s Guernica and Rockwell Kent’s Workers of the World, Unite!) Figurative political art gets you to think about issues through identification. Non-representational political art, like Nove’s, gets you to feel about them through empathy.
WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT?
Its visceral paint handling.
It’s clever synthesis of source material.
The way it scales microscopic biological drama up to larger than life size, without a missed beat.
WHAT IF I JUST HAD 10 MINUTES? Succumb to the magnetic pull of Bowing to their elders the formless shape emerged was it an artifact or a jawbone?/The space between articulated only by the resonance of their arabesque song. Then discover how the red-shaded surfaces calibrate different degrees of emotional heat.
WHO SHOULD SEE IT? Anyone that likes visually seductive work with an equally seductive though unobtrusive backstory.
THE VERDICT? See it now, see it later – you’ve got the summer. By all accounts, it feels like a scorcher coming on. The temperature will get hot, too.
HOW DO I VISIT? Gallery hours are 10 a.m. – 5 p.n., Monday – Friday. The show runs until August 24. The Gallery is located at 8687 Melrose Avenue, West Hollywood 90069. For more information, call (310) 922-3885 or visit here.
Metaphase: Sister Chromatids conventions of her gender #42
Bowing to their elders the formless shape emerged was it an artifact or a jawbone?/The space between articulated only by the resonance of their arabesque song.
Beyond the brush a buffalo and a foxtail