HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Carousel, an exhibition of new paintings by Lizzie Gill, marking her second solo presentation with the gallery.
Gill’s psychological still lifes concern themselves with dormancy, disuse, and decay through the inert animation of stoneware. Playing upon “showing taste,” the compositions syncretically marry the illusionistic depth of acrylic paint and photographic image transfers with dimensional elements of marble dust emulsion piped into place with a confectioner’s bag. As if in a merry-go-round, a matrilineal inheritance of caddies, amphorae, demitasses, and animal figurines parades through the paintings in gelid Wedgwood tones. In days past, dinner and tea were unthinkable without such ceremonious vessels, the performative labor of the place setting. Now, the air gathers close around them with unbroken silence. They survey from the sidelines like antiquated figures of state.
Riders and mounts trot through the Jasperware grounds of Gill’s painted vessels, dark and light reversed in their image-transferred visages. The English carousel descends from the Latin carrus (‘two-wheeled vehicle’) and the Italian carro (‘chariot’) to the French carrousel and Italian carosello: a joust, a tilting match, a game of war. The word gathered syllables even as its signified devolved from martial drills and regal pageants to carnival diversions and playthings. From charger to cob, palfrey to thoroughbred, mustang to rosinback, carousel jumper to rocking horse, this history slouches from activity to artifice, beasts of burden ritualistically wrung of use on spectacle and stunts.
Exploded across the gallery, equine fragments—disjoint muzzle, whinnying head—puzzle together into a replica of a 1950s Wonder Horse, upon which a child could play at soldier or cowboy from the saddle of a spring-suspended figurine. Among Gill’s first forays into sculpture, the plaster horse also calls out to cast courts at museums worldwide, speaking to a pre-photographic history of replicated imagery in which gypsum impressions enabled the capture of everything from Roman gods and archeological exhumations to prints in the sand. From the walls, Gill’s sectioned horse rears and makes ready to leap to battle, forgetting itself in reveries of a fictitious foe.
Many of Gill’s twilight interiors—put inside, aside, away—seem to dream of other worlds. In one painting, a moonscape appears, caught in the silhouette of a calyx krater. Elsewhere, on a two-handled urn, a bronco attempts to buck its rider against an astrological frieze. From the brittle safety of empire, the tea service turns like a satellite array to the frontiers of this world and the next, gently jogging science-fiction’s Western-genre roots. The paintings call to mind French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who, in his Poetics of Space, writes that the house “is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”
