By ELISABETH KIRSCH
Long before Google Earth, artists (or, perhaps, aliens) created images that could only be viewed in their entirety from way up high.
Witness the Nazca Lines in Peru, the prehistoric Serpent Mounds in Ohio, and crop circles just about everywhere. Rock drawings in the Australian continent demonstrate that mapping the Earth — or what one thought was the Earth — began before recorded time.
Barbara Grad’s paintings reflect that ancestral need to take a bird’s-eye view, the better to locate oneself on the planet.
Her recent paintings in “Video Villa,” now at Kemper at the Crossroads in her first solo museum exhibit, are contemporary evocations of urban and natural landscapes fabricated from a virtual reality high in the sky. Her dizzying compositions spin, catapult and melt into abstract roadways that seem to plummet to the center of the Earth.
Curator Barbara O’Brien notes in the exhibition essay that Grad refers to the colors, forms, meaning, and perspectives in her work as “collisions,” an apt description for the globe’s current state of boundary disputes, cultural overloads and shifting allegiances.
In all her work, Brad also abuts one painted panel next to another of different size, which reinforces the notion of a collision or of fluctuating perimeters.
Grad is a professor of painting at the Massachusetts College of Art. As an art student in Chicago, she became familiar with the work of Joseph Yoakum (1890 – 1972), an African-American outsider artist whose pen and pencil artworks of abstracted, sinuously drawn, flattened landscapes first came to attention in Chicago.
Grad was inspired by his art, as well as the ethereal, translucent 15th century paintings of Piero della Francesca in Tuscany.
The density of Grad’s compositions, along with their strong graphic quality, also aligns her work with the muscular, contorted abstractions of Gregory Amenoff, and the tangled, painted skeins of Terry Winters’ organic abstract art. Grad clearly shares the same love of painting for the sake of painting for which both those artists are famous.
But her work differs significantly from theirs. Besides using a multi-paneled format, Grad’s art possesses a viscous emotionality. Her paintings consistently allude to the necessity and difficulty of communicating across the geographical and psychological divides that are now every where.
In works such as “Video Villa” and “Erosion,” which are packed with circuitous passageways and maze-like spaces, escape is clearly not an option. “Executive Shift” acts as a visual for both the seductiveness and the depravity of Wall Street’s famed corporate corridors, which here offer no exit or entryway. “Greenspace” has an otherwordly, underwater sensibility that is inviting but chaotic.
“Round Trip,” one of the smallest, simplest and most appealing works in the exhibit, looks like a spider web spinning out of control. It is so flirty and meticulously painted that it presents one ride we wouldn’t mind taking. In a world with too much information, Grad’s art insinuates, at least try to enjoy part of the journey.
