Life as a House
Robin Rice on Visual Art: Treacy Ziegler: Before an Ocean
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Neuroscientists claim that our memories are altered every time we revisit them, a version of an unscientific idea familiar to art theorists. Every time we see and recognize a particular artwork, some say, we experience it anew. It may seem familiar, but our perception is always an amalgam of past and present encounters. Thus a familiar, loved artwork changes for us over time as it provides an ever-changing and engaging dialogue.
These thoughts grew out of a visit to Old City's F.A.N. Gallery to see Treacy Ziegler's paintings of houses. I was, first, reminded of meeting owner Fraidoon Al-Nakib (aka F.A.N.) way back in the early '90s when the gallery opened. Al-Nakib was understandably concerned about the future; art galleries rarely survive and prosper for a decade. But F.A.N., focusing mostly on representational painting, has remained viable and very much the place it was in the beginning: professional, friendly, presenting quality work without fuss.
Like the gallery itself, Ziegler's paintings are approachable and have an integrity that rewards thought. The landscape subjects, softened geometries and delicious colors recall the Murnau village landscapes of German Expressionist Gabriele Mnter, who influenced the contemporaneous paintings of her then-fiancé, Wassily Kandinsky (they lived together but never married).
Ziegler, a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts who shows widely, portrays the interior and exterior personas of unpeopled houses and furnishings. She acknowledges houses as "self-portraits," by which I think she means that our own houses mirror ourselves — certainly accurate. She also acknowledges that self-portraiture in her representations.
Quite often, Ziegler's interiors depict what appear to be her own paintings hanging on the walls: paintings framed by paintings. Gatekeeper, a view down a hall that leads through a series of doorways, includes what might be a narrow slice of the painting House Among the Trees. Is this painting of an exterior a bow to the inner representation of ourselves that we all hold in our minds? In this case, it would be the framed, "public" version of the self — perhaps as Carl Jung would have seen it.
"In the memory of space," Ziegler writes in a commentary posted on the gallery wall, "everyone is an artist." Her paintings recognize the subjectivity and mutability of our perceptions of space and its importance as an index to our understanding of ourselves and our relationships to others. Doorways in Ziegler's paintings suggest points of transition. Chairs explicitly, though understatedly, represent people. Birds, common symbols of the soul, are pretty much the only living things in these paintings.
Ziegler's comments on space were specific to Outside My Grandmother's House (pictured). At the center of this painting, a cottage, its central door flanked by dark, eye-like windows and surmounted by a deeply shadowed gable, must be Grandmother's. The little house is backed by a dark band of trees and a sky in which opaque clouds of dull violet mist over dark underpainting. As if lit by oblique harsh evening light, the buildings cast heavy shadows. The broad expanse of lawn filling the lower half of the canvas is a lurid greenish yellow, again laid over a dark ground.
The surface effect of the painting is charming, almost nostalgic, but the underlying mood is ominous. A tiny rowboat drawn onto the banks of the river in the extreme foreground is aimed like an arrow almost precisely toward the cottage door, waiting and hinting at ancient myths of boats that carry souls to the underworld.
Ziegler's use of expressive color is double-edged: seductive and suggestive of disturbing mysteries. The conceit of a slice of watermelon as a prism is typical. The translucent flesh, the antithesis of a cold, hard crystal, becomes at once a succulent focus of light and an artifact of the absent cutter and eater. By avoiding specificities, the painter draws us into her world.
Like her references to labyrinths and double vision, surfaces that are overtly simple become more resonant and layered with each encounter.
Treacy Ziegler: Before an Ocean Through Nov. 28, F.A.N. Gallery, 221 Arch St., 215-922-5155, fanartgallery.com
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