Dear Everyone,
If you’re reading this, it means you subscribed to my mailing list in 2021/2022. I have revived it from the dead—just in time for October. I’ll be sending sporadic emails via substack from now on. Either I’ll be updating you with shows I’m in, or sending along some thoughts on art that I see.
My Announcement:
I have two paintings at Art Toronto this weekend at the Towards Gallery booth. If you’re in Toronto, I would love to see you! I’ll be there for most of the weekend.
Brittany Shepherd with a caveat*
While I was in Montreal over the Thanksgiving long weekend, Paul and I visited Pangée for the Brittany Shepherd show. Pangée is one of those galleries that you need to know about to find; it’s tucked between mansions, embassies, and trees.
It’s raining outside. We walk through the glass doors and climb the creaking stairs. I see that the red haired girl is at her glass desk. A translucent oblong bar of orange soap with a hair coiling over its surface sits on the glass desk in front of her, glistening. She smiles and says “Bonjour, hi”. It feels like we’ve walked in to a David Lynch movie… if David Lynch were Petra Collins.
Pangée’s space is not inconspicuous. With its high ceilings and marble fireplaces and generous windows, it’s a character in every Pangée exhibition. The red haired girl once told me that this building, one of two identical and adjacent mansions, was built by an Austrian count. One for each of his two daughters. Something about the way she told me this implied some kind of Grey Gardens or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane type of tragedy.
Brittany Shepherd’s paintings feature closely cropped images of body parts and crumpled fabric, usually in dark rooms, lit by flash. Women’s feet feature prominently. I was struck by the size of the paintings. Not small but not very big, either. They’re an in-between size—around 18 x 30 inches—which worked beautifully in the domestic space turned gallery.
A tangent: Can you call a mansion domestic? Is it a domestic space when it’s a space built to entertain? Does the richest person you know live in a domestic space? That empty, echoing pot-light filled 4000 square foot house with the Andy Warhol that overlooks the pool… is that domestic? When the house in question is a space that 1% of people live in, does it qualify as domestic? Is the White House a house?
Shepherds paintings reference photographs; her source material is from fetish sites. But none of her work is explicit. There’s a painting of a woman’s head, wrapped in satin, her features all hidden except for a pink nose peeking through at the centre of the composition. It’s about the closest thing we get to a phallic symbol, that and the painting of the burning candle, slipped between a pair of thighs.
There’s another painting of a woman’s torso draped in soaking fabric. I think of Laura Mulvey’s essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, there’s a paragraph where she talks about the violence of cropping the female figure. Shepherd’s paintings are about visual pleasure, and they’re about violence certainly, but they’re not narratively driven.
These paintings are stagnant. Nothing exists on either side of them. You lean into her paintings, wanting them to give you something, have something revealed if you can get close enough, but nothing is revealed, they’re withholding.
The only exception to this are the pair of feet in the corner of the second room, to the left of the fireplace with the gleaming brass spark screen. These feet are alive. The veins float above powdery white skin. A bunion is forming at one of the big toes, the knuckle is throbbing red and shiny. This image should be mundane, but it’s not. It throbs back and forth between beauty and grotesqueness.
I notice another bar of soap is on the fireplace mantle, wrapped in a dark coarse looping hair, like a gift. It lies inert, prone, unassuming, but actually it’s kind of threatening sitting there. I hate it in the way you hate some evil little object in your grandmother’s house, or the mole on your teacher’s eyelid.
The problem with Shepherd’s work being shown in Pangée is this: Pangée invests the work with the tragedy of the building, the secrecy of its space, the worn extravagance of its marble fireplaces and crown mouldings and hardwood floor. Pangée makes Shepherd’s work about the perversity of wealth and power. About the public privateness of desire.
Would her paintings do all that in a white cube? When I see her paintings on my instagram feed bookended by an influencer’s travel photos and pictures of the British Museum, I feel the same way about her work as I do in Pangée. I feel shallow and kind of fucked up for wanting to go to Crate and Barrel, and then do wax play on the new bed, and then ogle the stolen objects in the British Museum (in this fantasy I guess I live in London).
Does her work need the context of extravagance?
*Brittany Shepherd’s work and my work share so many themes: desire, interiority and privacy, fantasy, femininity. I might be too close to this kind of work to have a trustworthy opinion
Oh I love these texts!
Really enjoyed this review x