April 25-May 1, 2002
art
Love and Joy
 Joy Feasley, Future Farmers of America, pencil on paper, 30 x 38 inches.  |
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Joy Feasley: Sky Clad -- A Naturist Love StoryThrough April 28, Vox Populi, 1315 Cherry St., fourth floor, 215-568-5513
In her third solo show at Vox, Joy Feasley brings together a selection of brand-new paintings and drawings, all from 2002, that exemplify her wide-ranging interests and ambitions as an artist. She draws from her past experiences on her family's dairy farm, her current life in a gritty section of Philadelphia and her lifelong passion for camping. She teases the viewer with cheesy images derived from kitsch and soft-core porn, yet also employs autobiographical images with great sincerity. She extols hedonistic nature worship, but tempers it with irony, and by using industrial materials like resin, vinyl and aluminum. Some pieces are beautifully and richly painted, others are crudely sketched on cheap paper. What is one to make of all this? Feasley herself explains it by citing charming idiosyncrasies found in a Campfire Girls handbook. My strategy is to look closer.
With lush colors and velvety surfaces, the seven paintings included in the exhibition illuminate Feasley's thematic interests and demonstrate her skill as a painter. In the vinyl-on-aluminum painting Lake Erie, 12 x 16 inches, a young woman wearing a greenish coat with a fur-lined hood appears to be meditating. The woman looks pleasant enough, though somehow without personality, like a generic saint who's been sweetened up with an airbrush. Behind her there's a stark and wildly psychedelic landscape -- turquoise and hot pink with a radiating linear pattern of greenish flames and flower petals -- emblematic of her internal visions. Triple Crotch Rocket, a nearly abstract motorcycle stripe detail rendered in resin and oil on plywood, and Go-Go, a lovely, posthumous portrait of the artist's distinguished-looking dog, indicate other areas of Feasley's painterly interest.
The six drawings in the show (all in pencil on cheap construction paper) twist together divergent themes that sometimes induce frisson in the viewer. Feasley's drawing technique is purposely "crappy" (Feasley's description) and consists of crabbed lines, undifferentiated value, conspicuous erasures and few details. Shutterbug (30 x 24 inches) shows a winsome young woman flashing a peace sign, and wearing only a camera around her neck. In Future Farmers of America, 30 x 38 inches, Feasley infuses a wholesome scene of young women on a farm with eroticism. Feasley's straightforward, unprettified approach emphasizes the vulnerability of her subjects, while withholding important information about their bodies and personalities. The effect is edgy, irritating and intriguing. These drawings, and the rest of Feasley's rich and complex work, are well worth a closer look.
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