Scaped.
One of my dear friends, Meghan Wilbar is having an opening tonight from 6-9 at Chashama Gallery in west Harlem. I had the pleasure of working with Meghan on and off for about a year and a half at the Brooklyn Museum as a freelance Art Handler where I learned that she was in fact a phenomenal painter and exceptional partner in crime.
Inside Meghan’s humble Greenpoint abode that acts as both a living space and studio, there is no couch, but you are immediately surrounded by her large scale paintings that line the walls of her studio like sculpture. At once your are immersed in a sea of thickly applied pigments that would no doubt assuage Jerry Saltz’s fear that painting is dead. In an art world that lauds highly conceptual and controversial art, I find Meghan’s paintings to be a refreshing contrast to the stale works in recent contemporary shows — the Whitney Biennial and Greater New York at PS1 comes to mind. Where the artists of the Biennial and Greater New York looked to breakdown and dissect painting as a medium (dare we call it neo- or proto painting or A.P —After Painting), they did so at the expense of loosing all qualities of the aesthetic. They resonate stagnantly as mere anatomical sketches when juxtaposed to miss Wilbars’ visceral domination of expressionistic landscapes. I really cannot express the former’s inherent flatness and immaturity which is almost insulting to the medium’s two- dimensional realm .
Meghan references an older and more classical style of painting, massaging the energy and surface of the abstract expressionists with the hint of landscape/ figuration that was seen briefly in Latin America’s Otra Figuration movement. Rather then being pigeon-holed into one of these former categories, Meghan stays relevant by citing her history, emotions and present setting as touchstones for content. The geo-linear lines and blade strokes are reminiscent of the geological formations of her native Colorado red-rock, while the hint of a landscape lingers like a city skyline receding into the background like a suggestion— making an atmosphere that is unmistakably urban. Her works are not bound by one particular mood, offering a uncommon level of freedom on the part of the viewer who can can create their own journey through her work without a predetermined route — something that is perhaps a modernist anomaly in today’s artists who look to polarize their audience.
Her works are fleeting and emotive, depicting moments that constantly ‘shift and reorganize to the pulse of city life,’ rather than specific subject matters. She aims to squeeze expansive landscapes into compressed spaces so that they become their own experience of reality and brief histories of her private experiences.’* While some appear menacing, dark and almost blood stained like, Crimson Heart, 2007/8, others seem more optimistic like the pastoral, Beyond Forever, 2009, leading the viewer deeper into the artist’s ever-changing psyche and the tension therewithin. Meghan’s intention is not to shock or deliver a particular message, but instead she invites you to look inside her work and find yourself, asking you to derive your own meaning from her glimpsing landscapes, without boundary, an act that is perhaps more dangerous and shocking then even the most bizarre conceptual piece albeit, unintentionally.
Beyond Forever
oil on linen, 22 x 28 inches, 2009
Crimson Heart
oil on linen, 36 x 48 inches, 2007-2008
Chashama Gallery
http://www.chashama.org/home.php
West Harlem Studios Gallery
461 West 126th St, New York, NY
July 3rd through July 18th
Gallery Hours: Friday, Saturday 1-6pm and by appointment
Reception: July 9th, 6-9pm
