Brooklyn Fire Proof News
Beautiful Decay: The Idea of Death is Tormenting Me (review)
posted May 01, 2006
The Idea of Death is Tormenting Me
Brooklyn Fire Proof
Beautiful Decay, Issue O, May 2006
Ann Toebbe’s second curatorial project with Brooklyn Fire Proof is a three-person show about death, an unlikely fixation for young women. Or is it? Gothic sensibilities have long abandoned their 12th century home and invaded youth culture. With evangelical tales of the end times influencing political gaffes of our own, it has never seemed a more appropriate time to paint it black. And so, the heroines of The Idea of Death is Tormenting Me (Lara Allen, Stacy Fisher, and Ann Toebbe), ruminate on the creeping glimpses of mortality that shimmer underneath the everyday.
The ghostly artifacts of Lara Allen’s meditations on demise include a sprawling wall drawing and two tiny gem-like paintings. Like her show-opening band, the Ragtime Germs, Allen’s paintings freely sample the past. She mines sources as disparate as Christian and Pagan imagery, nursery rhymes, and vaudeville to create paintings of familiar, yet mysteriously combined icons. For this show, Allen’s work focuses on death through the romantic gaze of aestheticized destruction; the wall drawing of an ethereal owl called “When the Sexton Plays Ghost” shows a robed figure swooping down from a crashing plane and the smaller paintings feature spooky fires.
Stacy Fisher’s ponderings on fatality find their resting place in carefully handmade objects. Like guardians to an alternate realm, two dogs are stationed in front of Allen’s wall drawing. “One Headed and Two Headed Dog” make a stone gray pair reminiscent of both lawn ornaments and gargoyles. “Hollow Log with Pearls” and “Two Bows With Bows” present common objects rendered poetic by their deliberate arrangements and subtle use of materials. A sense of preservation prevails, in the careful consideration of everyday objects and their gentle elevation into art.
Ann Toebbe’s paintings locate death’s mysteries in carefully remembered domestic rooms. A mostly black diptych is called “Christmas 1 and 2,” a third colorless painting is titled “The Devil”. These spaces are silvery and indistinct, recreating the experience of seeing in the dark or stumbling upon the familiar at the wrong time. There are devil’s horns in the fire, candelabras only cast a sick gray light, and toys gathered around the fireplace become menacing objects with unknown intentions. We understand the specific mood of Toebbe’s remembered moments and that these are her rooms, but they evoke in us a parallel journey of conjuring.
For Ann Toebbe, painting is a revival of her past, of memory otherwise dead and gone. For Stacy Fisher, object making is preservation and, for Lara Allen, death is theater. Together, these women give us a morbid but nevertheless playful view of their torment.
- Colleen Asper