Constance Mallinson

Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson Home Page Catalogue Essay | Images from the Exhibition

Project Series 38: Constance Mallinson
August 25- October 18, 2009


 

	Constance Mallinson "Severed Limbs," 2009 Oil on paper 52 1/2 x 60 /2 inches

Constance Mallinson’s Project Series 38 exhibition, “Nature Morte,” includes new paintings that examine how we construct meaning from nature and how we situate ourselves in nature, especially in an increasingly urbanized world. The inspiration for her work comes from numerous impulses: a lifelong involvement with nature spiritually, physically, and politically; a drive to expand her painting practice and processes; a passion for contemporary and historical art; a history of working within the landscape tradition; and a desire to interrogate the history of representations of nature. In a richly detailed, highly rendered trompe l’oeil style, Mallinson’s newest works combine the beautiful and the grotesque in equally unsettling and intriguing measure. The life-size oil on paper or plywood works depict figurative imagery ranging from a pile of twisted dead branches resembling severed limbs, to a naked couple composed of twigs and logs, to an exacting recreation of Edouard Manet’s 1863 seminal painting Olympia from natural materials reminiscent of the style of 16th-century Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

With collage as her organizing principle, she constructs her still life imagery from arrangements and compositions of decaying and rotten natural materials collected on daily walks through the semi-rural landscape where she lives. In this new work, she paints—observes—directly from nature, working from these collaged constructions of decomposed materials. Mallinson works intimately with her primary subject—nature and the natural world.

Mallinson uses these collaged natural images as an unsettling way to make us wrestle with or meditate on the perilous situation nature is suffering globally. Deeply moved by nature since childhood, Mallinson invests her art with nature’s sublime magnificence. Her work of the last thirty years profoundly reveals this love of both the natural world and art and art history.

Since the mid-1980s, Mallinson has constructed, as she terms them, “uber” landscape paintings composed of thousands of appropriated or “readymade” commercial photographic landscapes—such as postcards, calendars, National Geographic photography, advertising, and coffee table books on nature—combined and collaged into epic panoramic landscape paintings. She connected common images of nature into what seemed like an endlessly multiplying mass spread across an expansive vista of canvas and paint—from the vast to the intimate, from aerial shots to disappearing horizon lines, from wide angle shots to extreme close-ups, she filled the canvases with every conceivable aspect of nature from waterfalls to forests, from beach resorts to ski resorts, from hunting scenes to sunsets. Mallinson exclaims, “like the Hudson River painters on steroids.”

Mallinson’s intention was to explore the paradoxes about what constitutes “landscape” today—how the consumption and degradation of the natural world exists simultaneously with a perfected “Technicolor” representation of nature and the sublime beauty of painting. As a painter, Mallinson wanted to enlist the language of paint and its potential to move viewers emotionally and psychologically with nature and the landscape as her primary subjects. The earlier work responded to the tradition and history of painting, looking to 19th-century painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, or Frederick Edwin Church and their recording of their own experiences of the sublime and the uncanny in an earlier America.

Mallinson’s new work continues that close scrutiny of the sublime and the fantastic, now pushing her imagery closer to the grotesque. The last painting before her transition to still life paintings, Ruins (2007) depicted a multitude of man-made and natural ruins. This “meditation on mortality” prefigured her new search into a more condensed, direct, and immediate meditation on life, death, and our world now. While the content of her work has shifted into dramatic new territory, her collage process and her emphasis on technical virtuosity remains the same. Grounded in her painting practice, art history, philosophy, and contemporary art, her reinvigorated focus on nature, landscape, and mortality represents the fullest expression of her painting to date.

Constance Mallinson’s exhibition is the thirty-eighth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of exhibitions that brings to the Pomona College campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator