‘Katie Maratta & Owen McAuley’
D Berman Gallery
through Dec. 12
You drive out of Austin, go west or even east long enough, the big sky of Texas opens up like the lid to a box of blue infinity. You walk into a building, any building, the world comes
slamming down to dimensions defined by walls and ceilings, a shelter that prisons all senses even when it’s the most soaring cathedral. You enter the D Berman Gallery on Guadalupe, you’re going to find, for the next several weeks, the magnificence of the Lone Star State’s wide open spaces stretched thin upon panels that are no more than 1 inch high.
This, called New Horizons, is the work of Katie Maratta. Vistas of sparsely populated, meagerly ranched Western flatlands rendered in ink, pencil, and image transfer onto inch-high panels that run to 48 inches long when they’re not halted at a mere 12.
Amazing how something so large reduced to something so tiny can evoke the same sort of wistful, tumbling-tumbleweed feelings in the person perceiving it. I mean: You take a photo, even a fancy panoramic photo, of the actual scene that comprises all your eyes can see? It’s a photo that reminds you of the feeling of vastness, the lost lonesome dovetailing of everywhere and nowhere, but it’s just a reminder. Maratta’s work – and I think it’s partly due to its relentless monochrome, too – can put you right back into that wind-whistling state of emotion: It’s precisely the size and tone of the faded Texas outlands inside your head.
The paintings of Owen McAuley, the other artist in this two-person exhibition, are precisely the opposite. Precisely, in subject and color and medium and size; what a fine choice for contrast.
McAuley works in oil on linen and (at least in this show) focuses on residential interiors. But here’s another precise opposite: the opposite of banal. There are no homey scenes of fireplaces or arrangements of tables and flower-stuffed vases and the like in these paintings, no human figures to disturb the view. And the view is jarring. The view is, repeatedly, of light fixtures seen at strange angles within the shadowed surroundings that the fixtures’ illumination struggles to define. The corner of a bedroom wall, the ceiling of a rubicund hallway, the roof of some industrial building in a floodlit night-sky parking lot. And one wilderness scene – The Needle Never Ends – with a strange yellow light, surely not the sun that we know, shining through a stand of trees atop a crest in the oppressive darkness. It’s all very quotidian; it’s all extremely fucking eerie.
D Berman Gallery has a knack for excellent artistic pairings; this latest exhibition is another (highly recommended) example of that.
This article appears in November 6 • 2009.