Many of Duane Slick's paintings at Nielsen Gallery are shadowy and elusive in both form and content. That makes them fascinating to look at; they pull you in, but don't quite answer your questions. A Native American artist of the Sac and Fox Nation of Iowa, Slick takes the trickster coyote as his avatar.
He works largely in shades of white; brown figures hover below, as in a fog, sometimes emerging darkly to the top. Slick builds up the surface so it crackles or rises in ropy veins, mimicking patterns in Native American textiles. Lately, he's also tacked on plastic containers, of the sort a chocolate bunny comes in.
That pale bunny and a Mickey Mouse pop up off of the exhibition's titular painting, "Paths of My Fathers," a rugged piece streaked with vertical drips in black and white. Shadowy birds and snakes flit and coil beneath the surface. Portraits of Indians, a coyote's silhouette, and a couple of frogs are drawn crisply on top. Near the center, the whitewash thins to reveal more: an Indian soldier, a Native American man shooting a rifle, the American flag-cloaked shoulder of Sacajawea, borrowed from an iconic photo.
For Slick, obscuring and revealing layers of paint captures consciousness, the tangle of Native American identity, and the clash of insider and outsider.
"Tears of Unknown Origin" shows the form of a coyote's face, shifting as a shadow does under multiple lights. Teardrops of thick white spill down from the animal's eyes, which are blank, like those of a mask. This struck me as knee-jerk sentimentality for an artist as tough-minded and media-savvy as Slick, but perhaps not. It might be a riff on the crying Indian of the 1970s "Keep America Beautiful" public service announcements - played by Iron Eyes Cody, reportedly the son of Italian immigrants.
Reality can be harsher than the way Native Americans are sometimes portrayed on television. "Coyote and Drugs" sets the dark form of the coyote over a pale pattern of birds. A loose grid of cold and allergy capsules adhere to the painting, many with thick lines shooting out from them. The drugs read like shot bullets, the shadow coyote the target.
Meanings are not pat in Slick's paintings. The strong image-making, the lush built-up textures, and the hidden forms leave the viewer to do that work.
A face in the cloud
Ann Strassman paints faces we all know, from Dick Cheney to Jack Nicholson to Abraham Lincoln. She does it with athletic, spontaneous gestures in acrylic on flattened cardboard appliance boxes. Her show at Kidder Smith Gallery has a giddy appeal because her iconic subjects work hypnotically upon us viewers. We love seeing faces that we recognize, that have meaning for us. That they're made with such slapdash élan on cardboard throwaways makes them that much more perversely appealing.
You won't see Strassman's portrait of Dick Cheney hanging at the White House, not only because of its lowbrow materials, but because Cheney's lip lifts in a snarl. It's funny, but more political cartoon than painting. Her image of a leonine Fidel Castro is more interesting, more painterly: He leans back and exhales a cloud of cigar smoke, which gathers before him. It looks almost as if Castro has appeared, like a dream, in a puff of his own smoke.
The artist's Theodore Roosevelt looks oddly depressed, as if he's about to dissolve into a wash of drippy paint. She has brushed a sad Lincoln over a ragged fabric collage in red, white, and blue, like bloody bandages. It's no reinvention of Lincoln, or even a reinterpretation, which we'd look for in contemporary art. But it is beautifully executed.
Strassman couples Andy Warhol's fetishization of the famous with an expressionistic exuberance that says yeah, it's all just a dream, a flash of magic that tomorrow will hit the trash can. We might as well enjoy it while we can.
Lush color
Dorota Kolodziejczyk's edgy and lush color field-style paintings at Julie Chae Gallery play bait and switch with landscape, deftly treading the line between abstraction and representation. The artist stains and pours paint vertically on the canvas, sometimes prodding it with a brush, and then she turns the work on its side so all the verticals read like horizon lines. Those horizons build into shifty, spacious landscapes, but look twice and they flatten into an all-surface ode to color.
Her colors are bold, sometimes gorgeous and sometimes toxic-looking. Different passages of tone often have satisfyingly different textures, as in "Linz," which sports a stained aqua-blue passage near the bottom, through which you can see the canvas's weave, which looks fluid and deep beside the impenetrable slick of matte gray beneath it. Above, what might be an ivory sky interlaces with stripes of blue, where it might meet the sea.
Kolodziejczyk expertly plays colors against one another. In "Tropicana," the pale mint green colliding with a rush of sunset orange is cooling and a little sickening; sedate passages of burgundy and white below look as if they come from a completely different world. The work is provocative, but the show needs editing: The quality varies, with several canvases outshining others.
