MARION LANE : LIVING IN THE PINK AND GREEN

Film by Eric Minh Swenson. Music by John Allison and Charles Bernstein
Peter Frank, Jan 2013
Marion Lane has had occasion to work expansively, sometimes covering whole walls with her gently perverse quasi-organic shapes. For this show, though, Lane constrained herself to so many 20-inch-square panels, describing upon them all manners of bubble, fungus, pebble, amoeba, and amorphous organism, pre-organism, or non-organism. Part doodle, part diagram, part cross section, part microscopic specimen, each of the twenty-odd paintings composes itself into something equidistant from creature, landscape, pattern, and rainbow, a stripey, psychedelicized little meditation on how things grow and how things flow. Several of the panels feature separate acrylic disks affixed at strategic moments in those compositions, extending their already burgeoning forms ever so slightly (and eye-trickingly) into actual space and underscoring the basis of Lane's formal vocabulary, the blob. Or eye. Or nipple. Or navel. Or tongue. Or, more to the point, all of the above. You would think that, at this intimate scale, such blobby playfulness would become cartoony, and beyond a dozen or so, it would get a bit tiresome. Not at all. Lane's effervescence, like her palette, is relatively restrained and her compositions engagingly complex (except when simple to the point of dopey -- not the best work in the group, but providing the eye something of a respite). And, for all their stripes and orbs, the paintings are as distinct from one another as siblings born a year or two apart.
LAUNCH LA:
Lane's work lends itself to infinitely layered interpretation. First we may believe we have plunged beneath the sea to witness the wildly colorful profusion of poisonous sea-slugs and their sub-aquatic garden habitats. A second look and we are sitting far too close to the television; the miniscule pointillist dots that compose its moving images have been blown up only to leak color like cracked LCD screens. Of this Lane says: "These paintings although heavily influenced by television are actually landscapes or topographical maps". They are maps of Lane's domain: stripes, dots and sliding, shifting hardly geometric shapes like the melting clocks of Dali''The Persistence of Memory'. They are alluring, engaging and many other things besides.
The constant need to visually reassess Lane's works is an intentional calculation - Lane wants to keep our eyes and minds processing: ahead lies the fork between interpretation and elementary appreciation of Lane's artistry. All that matters is we engage what Lane calls the "roving freewheeling eyeball" for an elusive and yet thoroughly enjoyable experience.
For more info on Eric Minh Swenson or project inquiries visit his website : www.thuvanarts.com
ART SERIES: www.thuvanarts.com/take1
MUSIC VIDEOS: www.thuvanarts.com/musicvideos