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By Michael Paglia
WESTWORD,
Denver
March 11-17, 1999
When British artist Erica Daborn moved to Los Angeles in 1987, she came
empty-handed. Leaving her work back in England she arrived in the United
States with little more than her art degrees from the Winchester School
of Art and the Royal College of Art and a reputation for her figural
style.
That
style soon changed drastically,
however. Being in an intense
and alien environment without
any of her work, which was
so closely linked
to her identity as an artist,
threw Daborn into a kind of
culture
shock that soon manifested
itself in new work. The result
fills Out of Place,
an in-depth look at a decade’s
worth of Daborn’s meticulous
paintings and drawings that closes
this weekend at the University
of
Denver’s Art and Art
History Gallery.
In
England, Daborn had used a
labor-intensive technique.
But in Los Angeles, she
began to quickly sketch images
in charcoal, freely translating
them into paint. Out of Place
includes one of these preparatory
drawings - “Reconstructive
Surgery,” a
charcoal on paper from 1987
that leaves no ambiguity
as to how Daborn was adjusting
to her new home. In a creepy
tableau, the artist depicts
herself on an operating table.
Her arms and legs have been
cut off;
her heart, with severed veins,
lies in the foreground. In
the background, the doctor
applies a power sander to
one of her three breasts,
and
a
nurse waxes her bikini line
while another, off the picture
plane, plucks her eyebrows.
Daborn has erased details
in places, providing a smeary
ground for the fully fleshed-out
figures.
Daborn’s
maladjustment to the Californian
environment and her biting
view of its superficiality
continue to be wells of artistic
inspiration
from which she draws to this
day. But she’s also interested
in social commentary from
a leftist perspective. Her
linking of cosmetic
surgery to more benign forms
of beauty treatments- she’s
wearing curlers in “Reconstructive
Surgery”- suggests political
(in this case, feminist) content.
The stunning “Networking,” a
1989 oil on masonite, takes
a broader swipe at life in
Los Angeles. Across this
large, horizontal picture,
four figures
hide behind masks,
looking part-human, part
-sculpture. Each is perched
on a stand,
and all are interconnected
by wires attached to their
heads. The four -two
men and two women -are fiercely
engaged in conversation while
passing business cards to
one another.
In “Networking,” Daborn
displays the abstraction of
the human figure that today
is her signature, an approach
that is simultaneously
charming and disturbing. The
figures suggest illustrations
from some nightmarish children’s
book -a not-incidental reference,
since Daborn has increasingly
looked to childhood imagery
since the birth
of her daughter, Nico, in 1989.
Out
of Place includes many paintings
that take on the topic of motherhood,
both in relation to Nico and to
Daborn’s own mother. “The
Blue Cat,” an exquisitely
painted oil on canvas from
1993, tells the story. In
the foreground, a little girl
clutches a doll, perhaps
Daborn clutching her daughter,
as a winged horse carries
off an older woman meant to
signify her mother. This painting,
which reveals a debt
to modern master Marc Chagall,
has a lyrical quality seen
in few other pieces here.
Another
way
Daborn
expressed
her
role
as
a
mother
was
by
replacing
the
wires
of “Networking” with
umbilical
cords
in “Life
Support,” a
small
oil
on
masonite
from
1992,
and
many
other
paintings.
In “Life
Support,” a
standing,
worm-like
mother
with
a
baby
bottle
strapped
to
her
back
is
attached
to
a
supine
stuffed
animal
by
a
cord
coming
out
of
her
mouth.
In
another
oil
on
masonite,
the
fastidiously
painted “Pacifier”-one
of
eight
pieces
from
the
1997 “Mothercraft”
series
included
in
Out
of
Place
-a
green
teddy
bear
is
linked
by
a
cord
to
a
woman’s
head
shown
in
profile.
Although
her mysterious iconography
and idiosyncratic representational
style are the most obvious features
of Daborn’s work, these paintings
also display an expert color blending
technique in which each shade
is the product of many disparate
hues. And Daborn’s scrupulously
smooth surfaces are sublime;
they actually gleam. Daborn may
have left her artistic past behind,
but she quickly found her way
to even greater work.
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“Out
of Place” Paintings and Drawings 1987-1997
University of Denver, January 8 - March 13 1999
Catalogue essay
Buzz Spector December 1998
Even
the most everyday things possess a
Reservoir of the uncanny.
It is the responsibilty of the
painter to
Capture something of that strangeness
for her
Art
Daily life’s the subject
here, as seen with
Antic eyes. The hybrids in these
pictures are less
Bizarre than they first seem,
once their
Ordinary anguish is recognized.
The painter
Renders her domestic bestiary
in order that we
Notice how near its circumstances
are to ours.
Poem by Buzz Spector
Erica
Daborn’s art might fall under the heading of metaphysical painting
if a viewer were to attend strictly to hieratic bearing of its not-exactly-human
subjects or the flattened and luminous environments in which they are
painted. The delicate but relentlessly sustained brushwork in Daborn’s
paintings would evoke so-called “outsider” art if one looked
past the shrewd visual punning within the currents of her touch. The
clarity and simplicity of these depictions might even suggest the work
of a child (and indeed portions of one painting here were done by a
five-year old) if you fail to see their wise and sorrowful comportment.
The tenderly metaphysical attitude of Daborn’s
work is where you start from
in appreciating it, but only
a recognition of their
astute
and thoroughly contemporay
critical commentary will lead
you to the bigger picture.
Daborn’s
paintings feature a retinue
of bizarre personages afloat
in poetically barren spaces
whose mysterious absence of
detail is reminiscent
of the pittura metafisica of
Giorgio De Chirico. There’s
a melancholic and encoded
familial history in this work
that’s also allied with
De Chirico, but whereas his
paintings bristle with male
symbols (chimneys,
locomotives, flagpoles and
bunches of bananas, to name
a few), Daborn shows us a
more well-rounded view of the
emotional transactions of family
and community systems. Her
oil on masonite NETWORKING,
1989. done shortly after her
move to Los Angeles from Wales,
includes a quartet of precariously
balanced figures perched on
stone blocks above an empty
sea. We see the human faces
of this foursome emerging from
behind masks of rather
alien character as they struggle
to keep them in place while
simultaneously offering each
other such tokens of social
currency as sex (lips on a
plate), drugs (a wine goblet
or a glowing capsule), prestige
(a fistful of business cards).
Daborn’s paintings in
oil on masonite or canvas
are usually highly finished,
but her large format charcoal
drawings
are looser, more gestural exercises,
hardly held back in their expressive
force. ENTRE NOUS, 1990, shows
somebody’s mother standing
on a pedestal, arms held wide
for balance as she leans back
against the weight
of the sacklike child carrier
she’s wearing. The carrier
is heavy because the elfin
little girl it holds has company,
her father perhaps,
crouching in its folds. This
tableau is rendered right on
top of another, largely erased
composition, but this is no
accident. What better way
to show how having a child
can change a family’s
plans. n fact Daborn and her
husband, filmaker Dennis Lanson,
were new parents. Their
daughter, Nico, was born in
August 1989, and Daborn’s
work soon began reflecting
her new role.
Between
1990 and 1993, Daborn produced
a series of paintings that
dealt with motherhood. At
the same time she was examining
her relationship
with her own mother, and the complex
emotional interweavings of
mother-daughter relations are
the subject of THE BLUE CAT,
1993, in which a little girl
holding a baby doll seems to hide
while a fantastical winged
horse carries
off her mother under a pale moon.
The woman’s pose, supine
with crossed arms, suggests
death, as does the asthmatic
gray color in which
both horse and figure have
been painted. The little girl
watches through the portal
cut into one wall of the boxlike
form in which she stands,
while the blue cat of the title
crouches on top of the box,
holding a purple ribbon with
one paw. This subtley umbilical
ribbon curls into
the box where its other end
is wrapped around the neck
of the little girl’s
doll.
Daborn’s
psychological and sociological
interests also took form in
her 1993 curatorial project,
Backtalk, with Marilu Knode,
at the
Santa Barbara Contemporary
Arts Forum. That exhibit (and
accompanying catalogue) was
a thoughtful selection of California
women artists extending
feminist ideas across a range
of studio practices. But Daborn’s
feminism, while deeply felt
and articulated, isn’t
the central aspect of her
artmaking. Her paintings are
full of sophisticated references
to the status of women in society,
but who are also suffused with
playful and tender moments,
as in her striking 1994 triptych,
FAMILY, which
includes several motifs painted
by Nico. The child’s
hand ie evident in the lettering
and numbering that appears
across three canvases,
and
in the little fairy, complete
with magic wand, standing
on the frame of a mirror
in the
center scene.
Since
the family’s move to
Boston in 1995, daborn’s
work has focused specifically
on emblems of maternity and
mortality. Her
“Mothercraft Series” of
smallish oil on masonite works
can be clearly read as reflections
on parenting. In HEALER, say, or
PLAYMATE,
both 1997, childlike reveries
of hospital care or horseback riding
are given an extra emotional gravity
through Daborn’s distortions
of scale and physiognomy, and
through the oddly somber expressions
on
the faces of the tiny nurse
tending a sick teddy bear in the
former work, and of the crouched
parental figure in the latter.
Daborn
brings a very pragmatic recognition
of the occasional trials and
tedium of family life to her
studio, but there is no sense
of complaint
or sacrifice imbuing the work.
The serious business of motherhood
achieves iconic status in
her pictures, rendered with
a devotion that connects
this seriousness to the aesthetic
intensity of art.
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NEW ART EXAMINER
September 1992
Margaret Lazzari
Erica Daborn
Sherry Frumkin Gallery
1440 Ninth St.
Santa Monica, 310/393-1853
Erica Daborn’s titles collectively acted as a great introduction
to this recent exhibition of her paintings. Trick or Treat, Codependent,
Rapunzel, Juggler, and Equilibrium straddle the storytelling and pop
psychology. The title of the exhibition, “Small Truths,” summarizes
well these modest-sized paintings that evoke the surreal, alienated,
or tender/tragic aspects of modern life.
Daborn
tackles fundamental truths
in an almost fairy-tale style,
where a kernel of hard
truth underlies an image apparently
simple enough
for children. Many fairy tales
have a bite of cruelty that
children relish, but which
may be a bit too true, too
raw for adults. Adults are
sheathed
by veneers of sophistication,
over-protecting their inner
selves, making them impervious
to all kinds of modern-life
lies and chicanery, but
woefully vulnerable when
hearing the truth. Daborn’s
paintings are effective in
the same way. Her style is
deceptively simple, with
a few well-defined figures
or objects set against a simple
background, a horizontal line
dividing the blank sky from
the blank ground. Her
thinly layered paintings
are often bright and acidic.
In Rapunzel, a
stump of a man, truncated
below the waist, sits like
a bowling pin on a Naples-yellow
ground, his similarly disfigured
horse next to
him. They recall nothing
if not chess pieces, complex
real-life individuals reduced
to impotent markers. Rapunzel
is high in the tower and the
castle
sits far back in the De Chirico-like
space. It would be hard to
imagine
an image where objects of
desire seemed more hopelessly
distant.
In
Codependent, a pitiful greenish-colored
man offers a flower to a supine
woman who balances a ball on
her feet. Both struggle
like trapped
insects, he a suspended worm,
she an overturned beetle, each
flailing about but unable to
change position or close the
gap between them.
Like a dream, Daborn’s
simplified imagery seems at once
bizarre and familiar. Her use
of caricature, mask, and cartoon
both flattens
and
exposes the inner person.
Her veiled actors seem odly medieval;
as in paintings by Bosch, her
mutant figures may be half human,
half animal.
In
The Royals, two women walk
along a road to a castle. Their
heads are topped by crowns,
they are dressed in matching
stodgy dresses,
and each wears the same serious
expression; they would be identical
except for their difference
in scale. The Royals seems
funny at once, with
these frumpy, snooty, uppity,
mock-British royalty -they
even look a bit like Queen
Elizabeth. On the other hand,
they might be any mother
and daughter, in one of those
strange role-reversals found
in families, where the child
leads the parent, and ends
up looking as much like the
parent as the parent herself.
Daborn’s simple truths
are open-ended, with multiple
readings possible. And that
is her greatest strength.
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SANTA BARBARA METRO
June 11-17, 1992
Daborn’s Dark and Humored World
Laura Funkhauser
We
all have our own set of recurring
dream symbols which are sometimes
brought on by repeating circumstances
in our conscious lives. These
images can be seen as being
mildly inconvenient, or as
the tip of the iceberg. Erica
Daborn chooses the latter.
Using
imagery from the fluid world
of the unconscious as a springboard
into the precariousness of
relationships and self-definitions
in the
real world, her paintings
give form to the disjointed
feelings buried within her
own dream fodder. Her works
are now on view at Francis
Puccinelli
Gallery in Carpinteria through
July 3.
Daborn’s
darkly-humored and richly somber-colored
paintings are each a tableau,
populated with nurses, toys,
or queens, all doll-like
people, rendered in generalized
cartoon style, usually with
limbs but no articulated hands
or feet. These characters are
involved in relationships
that that pivot on a social
identity or role-playing. While
it is sometimes obvious where
one figure offers what the
other is lacking, it is always
unclear as to the intentions
behind the dynamic of the relationship.
Daborn uses this lack of definition
in the dream realm to convey
a sense
of being out of sorts with
the world, being caught between
the forces that aren’t
reducible to good and bad.
These individual worlds are
given further insularity, being
held beneath layers of glossy
lacquer.
The
works have an hysterical emotional
quality reminiscent of the
works by German Expressionist
painter, Max Beckmann.
Unlike
Beckmann, though,whose
paintings were serious and allegorical
-often based on archetypal
and biblical motifs -Daborn’s
canvases are illustrative of
human folly and self-delusion.
The more seriously you approach
the distressed looking
figures, the funnier they
become. As in “The Royals,” which
depicts a large queen and
a little queen, standing side
by side, with
a castle in the bachground,
and both apathetically and
dutifully extending theirt
hands as if in a receiving
line. They are so wrapped up
in their
roles they don’t even
notice there are no subjects
to receive.
“Codependence,” a luminescent jewel-toned work, shows two
figures, one suspended in mid-air by some sort of truss, holding a flower
out to a figure on its back, who is balancing a ball on its feet. The
suspended figure has hands, which the lying figure doesn’t, and
the lying figure has feet, which the suspended figure doesn’t.
The reslulting effect isn’t a harmonic one, though, and the figures
themselves don’t look comfortable with their coupling.
No
matter how pinched they look,
Daborn’s figures are
all humorously noble, resigned
to their fates of being caught
in static and convoluted
co-existence with others
who are equally incapacitated
to themselves. It is tempting
to approach these pictures
as puzzles and to look for
solutions out of these cyclic
interactions. Solutions are
futile in this oddly fated
dream world, where, one suspects,
as in the infamous
croquet game in Alice in
Wonderland, the rules are always
changing so that there cannot
be a resolution. Rather than
find ways to make these
problems disappear, Daborn’s
work suggests that if we
can laugh at our demons,
we can also see how important
it is to give them a
place in our conscious lives.
Daborn
has stumbled onto a fascinating
psychological terrain, but
it would be interesting to
see her stray away from her
own
well-defined
path and free herself from the
imposed tableau structure of
the works.
If she loosed these characters
from their inertial webs of
co-dependency, there’s
no telling what these demons
would do on their own.
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The Santa Barbara Independent
June 29, 1989
Josef Woodard
Erica
Daborn’s paintings are
bold, fetishistic images that
purport to address social
squalor and existential discontent
in symbol-laden
mazes.
In
CAF’s Outerspace Gallery,
Erica Daborn shows her own
portraits of a civilisation
on the dole, cynically putting
humanity in a
bleak
light. Hers are bold, fetishistic
images that purport to address
social squalor and existential
discontent in symbol-laden
mazes. If that
sounds like heavy baggage,
Daborn lightens the load considerably
with her gothic
surrealism. Much as Daborn
appears to wear angst on the
sleeve, hyperbole makes her
work veer closer to engaging
morbid satire.
Max
Beckmann is one obvious influence,
as he has been for many contemporary
painters in this neo-Expressionist
epoch. Balancing Act might
be an
open homage to Beckmann,
with its cynical and familiar
litany of images in a cramped,
mythical space. A burdened
woman on all fours holds up
a menagerie while precariously
holding an egg (fertility)
in a spoon in her mouth. Similarly,
Home Stretch is awash in Egyptian
symbolism.
She also grapples with more current themes. Home Box Office indicts
the desensitization of children in the pallid blue glow of television.
Reconstructive Surgery depicts cosmetic surgery and the perversity of
human renovation science. High Climber is a bizarre narrative melange,
with workers carrying sculpted body parts to a billboard marked by a
spoonful of pills. Below, cars flit along a suspended roadway. Above,
a plane slices through the smoggy murk of an urban sky. In the middle
ground, disjointed humanity looks for a comfortable place to roost.
Calculated tension fuels both the imagery and the process of Daborn’s
work. Her palette wavers between grim, sickly hues - gray, mucky
pinks and greens, choking browns - and more brilliant splashes, while
the
dense mottled painting technique is flattened out by her use of paint
on masonite. Thus arises a push-pull effect of deliberate image distortions
and painterly sensuousness.
Because
these allegories are so vivid
and entertaining, it’s
hard to take her despair without
grains of salt. The colliding
symbols in
Daborn’s paintings
are laid on thickly, adding
to her work’s
dualist atmosphere. Neither
just blackly humorous nor
openly despairing, the paintings
exist on the popular precipice
between the pure joy
of painting and the dull
pain of dread and alienation.
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L.A.WEEKLY
December 11-17, 1987
1987 CRITIC’S PICKS
Robbie Conal:
ERICA DABORN
Add
growing up just outside London
and an extended tour of duty
in Wales to a year
and a half’s culture
shock in L.A., and you’ve
got a recipe for stick-to-the-ribs,
intense, adversarial expressionism:
Erica Daborn’s politics
of experience. She makes
big nasty paintings and large
charcoal drawings that chronicle
her encounter-culture
in
California: pictures with
titles like Reconstructive
Surgery, Wheel of Fortune,
Community Care, Hollywood
Style and even The Good Ship
California.
You get the idea.
But
don’t understand her
too quickly - all this would
make for heavy going except
for the wacky complexity of
her vision. Part appreciation
of the sociopolitical density
of the issues she’s airing,
part expression of her own
need to acclimate herself to
a new situation,
her pictorial syntax is a
cross-cultural stew of Max
Beckmann distortions floating
next to chunks of grand Mexican
mural style, spiced with
humor as savage as George
Grosz, and suspended in a post-cubist
space warp.
This
is ambitious work in the better
sense of the word. As Daborn
puts it, “Art
can have a critical
social function. Its
not necessarily just
about decorating walls.
Something’s got
to cut through all
this superficial bullshit
- there’s just
too much money invested
in movies for them
to do it, TV is a lost
cause, so in this town
I guess
it’s up to art.”
Her
attack works best when it admits
her own complicity, her sense
of the overwhelming, seductive
potential of L.A. Reconstructive
Surgery
is about body-culture tyranny
- women are pressured, often
at a surgeon’s
knife-point, to look “perfect.” But
Daborn’s subtext
is what gives her best pictures
their double-edged poignancy.
In this case her reconstruction
metaphor also expresses the
very personal pressure
she’s under to adjust
her attitudes to the reality
of, as James Brown says, “Living
in America!” So, it’s
a self-portrait. Wheel of
Fortune would qualify as
both scathing indictment
and personal
conundrum. A first reading
would include insincere politicians
(does this seem redundant?),
extremes of wealth and poverty,
war, drugs, and
one of her recurrent themes:
the ubiquitous banality of
TV. Not exactly Vanna White’s
idea of a gratifying spin
of the star-spangled Wheel.
On
the other hand, Erica’s
own wheel is spinning right
now. She’s
face to face with L.A., her
big gamble. So the greater
issues hit very close to home.
In fact, her whole project
- 15 pictures at latest count
- is called “Waiting
for a Miracle.” Think
of all the scriptwriters
in town who can identify
with that. If Daborn keeps
her sociopolitical
pot boiling and remembers
to stir in a liberal dose
of humor, California
local color (how about those
gorgeous smog-enhanced sunsets,
Erica?), and enough self-reflexive
innuendo to keep it personal,
her up will
surely runneth over. The
L.A. art scene can use the
nourishment.
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