Essays and Reviews

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=200 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <FONT SIZE="6" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Dana Clancy</B></FONT>     |     <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Dana Clancy"><U>home</U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id3.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Paintings"><U>Paintings</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id4.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Works on Paper"><U>Works on Paper</U></A>   |   <B>Essays and Reviews</B>   |   <A HREF="id2.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Bio"><U>Bio</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id23.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Contact"><U>Contact</U></A></div> <div> <B>Essays and Reviews</B></div> <bR> <div> <B>BOSTON GLOBE REVIEW</B></div> <div> By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent  |  December 2, 2005</div> <bR> <div> Mary Cassatt's ''Woman in Black at the Opera" (1879), at the Museum of Fine Arts, shows a woman with opera glasses watching the show; in the distance, a man turns his binoculars on her. Dana Clancy, a deft young painter with an unsettling exhibition at the Sherman Gallery at Boston University, takes a cue from Cassatt. She considers the act of looking.</div> <bR> <div> Stand in one section of the gallery, and you'll find the subject of nearly every painting gazing right at you. The figures peer uncomfortably upward, their faces framed in bright-colored ovals and cut off at the chin. It's a bit like looking through a peephole and glimpsing someone outside your door who is short, but stretching up to gaze right back in at you. These images are wry and disturbing; they burble with character, but the characters appear as if they're both reaching toward you and are completely inaccessible. The artist's technical proficiency makes the scene all the more tense.</div> <bR> <div> In another area, Clancy has covered one wall with a gray, maplike painting; smaller paintings on wood panels depicting spectators hang over it. The spectators look not at us, but off in another direction, as at a parade passing by. It's a relief not to be stared at, but if you look to the left, you'll see a wall full of small paintings of people with binoculars -- who might be focused at you, but they might also be focused at the spectators, and you're somehow just in their line of sight.</div> <bR> <div> Traditionally, the viewer is the one doing the looking. By turning scrutinizing eyes back at the viewer, Clancy makes us the object of her art. The whole gallery space, with all those eyes, takes on a threatening charge that may send you running. That's worth sticking around for.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>WATCHING YOU WATCHING ME: NEW WORK BY DANA CLANCY</B></div> <div> An essay by Rachael Arauz, Ph.D., Independent Curator  |  Written for the solo exhibition <I>Intimate Distance</I>  |  August 2005</div> <bR> <div> Dana Clancy's recent work takes as its subject the act of looking. The process of all painting and drawing inherently implies this activity, yet Clancy's elegant compositions uniquely propose a complex understanding of how we see with our eyes and our memory. Although seemingly unrelated in theme, her enigmatic portraits and her views of tourist walkways together reveal the artist's attention to the experience of observation. Employing a variety of formal strategies throughout her working process, Clancy situates her audience on both sides of the viewing experience-as spectator and spectacle-with images that are full of mystery, wit, and visual intensity.</div> <bR> <div> Clancy's paintings are a skillful and intricate hybrid of drawing from life, photographic sources, and her own memories and imagination. Her portrait process sometimes begins with a staged photograph of her subject, often wearing a hat or affecting an exaggerated facial expression. The camera lens thus offers Clancy an initial source of optical intervention, allowing her to frame, edit, and contain her subjects. Her painted representation of these sitters mediates the instantaneous nature of the camera image with delicately rendered, graphic forms built up over time. The intensely colored shapes of matte pigment that surround her sitters further transform the literal, documentary vision of the photographic source into a painterly, conceptual experience. In <I>Camouflage</I> (2005), the pregnant subject pushes beyond the limits of the pink ovoid form, both echoing and anticipating the emerging fetus within her body. The silhouetted leaf forms that cascade down and across the canvas disrupt the photographic residue of the carefully modeled figure and insist on a representational flatness that locates the subject in a metaphorical realm of memory and emotion.</div> <bR> <div> In <I>Futures</I> (2004) Clancy's assertive female subject recalls the equally self-assured woman with binoculars in Mary Cassatt's 1879 <I>Woman in Black at the Opera</I> that hangs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Cassatt's composition, a small male figure in the distance turns his opera glasses on Cassatt's subject, both echoing the woman's gesture as well as reinforcing the gendered nature of subjecthood. In contrast, Clancy's woman is alone on the canvas and turns her gaze outward to confront the viewer. The bright, double lenses of her binoculars obscure the viewer's efforts to identify her and intensify the viewer's potentially uneasy sensation of being observed, even scrutinized, with an optical device meant to amplify distant details. The soft grey atmosphere and darker, horizontal passage along the lower edge of the canvas may suggest a nighttime cityscape as the object of her gaze, with bright bits of paint punctuating the foggy ambiance like twinkling lights, yet the disjunctive scale of the woman looming above the horizon redirects her vision out of the composition to face the gallery visitor.</div> <bR> <div> This shift of the viewer between spectator and spectacle is a vital theme in Clancy's work and plays out most dramatically in her installation for this exhibition, in which individuals from a crowd of parade spectators are isolated on a series of small panels that erupt on the surface of a brilliant field of color. Clancy observes each viewer's head from slightly above, which focuses our attention on their visual activity and also heightens our own alertness to the sensation of being watched. Cassatt and her colleagues, such as Manet and Degas, often made the act of observation their subject matter, as well, and like these nineteenth-century painters, Clancy explores the various incarnations of the modern-day <I>flaneur</I> in order to consider how we interact visually with the people and landscape around us.</div> <bR> <div> In her <I>Viewpoint Series</I> Clancy's subject is the landscape, yet once again, she turns her attention to the experience of looking by focusing on the guided gaze of the tourist. In <I>Hot Spot</I> (2004) a ribbon of wooden walkway emerges out of Yellowstone National Park's sulphurous fumes to steer the viewer through the fragile, crusted topography. The ambiguous foreground edge of the canvas, in fact, implies our own presence on the walkway. The deep red paint that defines the handrails guides our eye through the composition, as it simultaneously determines the limits of the tourist's experience. The lone tourist depicted in the image gazes out at Yellowstone's natural wonders, yet Clancy denies that experience to the gallery viewer, directing our attention instead to the controlled nature of looking and being looked at.</div> <bR> <div> Clancy's rich, complicated palette and painterly brushstrokes generate alluring surfaces, and it is easy to enjoy her work purely for its technical mastery. Her blend of graphic modeling, decorative forms, and chromatic range, however, interrogate our status as viewers of the landscape, viewers of people, and viewers of the work of art. Embedding within her paintings both the observer and the observed, Clancy's works insist on our own active participation in the exchange of gazes with the world around us.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>BIG, RED AND SHINY REVIEW</B></div> <div> by Heidi Marston  |  December, 2005</div> <bR> <div> <B>DANA CLANCY @ BU</B></div> <bR> <div> Have you ever had the feeling that you were being watched? Have you ever taken the subway and felt someone's eyes looking at you? That feeling of being seen in an uncomfortable and almost invasive way was how I felt seeing Dana Clancy's exhibition, Intimate Distance, at Boston University. The architecture of the GSU Sherman Gallery is the perfect design for this exhibit; as you walk up the stairs you can feel the eyes of her paintings looking at you through the entirely glass walls that face the outside. As you walk in and wonder through the space you are never really quite sure if it is the gaze of the people in the artwork or the people outside that glass that make you feel uneasy.</div> <bR> <div> I first encountered Clancy's work in the exhibit, Face to Face, at the Green Street Gallery in 2003 where she had portraits with compositions that looked like they had been painted by looking through a peep hole, or from snapshots imprinted in your head by catching someone out of the corner of your eye. Clancy's delicate and deliberate painting style creates a space of tension on the canvas. At first glance they are strange and kind of story-like, but the more you look the more you are looked at in a variety of uncomfortable ways.</div> <bR> <div> In this new exhibit Clancy show us that there are many ways of being seen. On one wall are some landscapes, with a deck or a piece of architecture, that have people gathered or the people look as though they are missing from the scene. On another wall there are a series of small works that portray people looking out at the viewer from behind binoculars. If you move out of the way the subjects are staring at the people in the paintings on the wall across form them. While it is not uncommon to view many things in life through binoculars it is still an obstructed way of looking at anything. Binoculars are uncomfortable, you are usually viewing from a distance, and often you are spying on something you aren't meant to see. Being the subject of that gaze is discomforting and I wonder if the artist is intending to make me want to leave her exhibition, because when being stared at, you move until you are no longer in the voyeur's line of site. Moving to another place in this gallery does not relieve the tension of being both the spy and the spied upon. If you are looking at a series on one wall, there are eyes behind you and to both sides of you. In a way Clancy's work is more like an installation in how it changes the psychological space of the gallery.</div> <bR> <div> My favorite piece in this exhibition is an entire wall painted a shade of green-grey with a faint brownish map-like image as the backdrop that connects groups of small paintings. There are several small paintings of people who are grouped together and describing the various lines of site becomes like something out of a comedy routine,</div> <bR> <div> They see me looking at those two over there, who look back at that guy who sees that girl looking at the person next to him while the whole time I can see everything that is going on.</div> <bR> <div> It looked like an illustration of having friends on the Internet, having that uncomfortable space between you and those you seek out and what connects you is simply having the desire to look. This was the moment where I really loved being in the gallery with all of Dana Clancy's different visions of how we look and how we are looked at. The wall piece is to me a diagramed explanation of how we interact every day, intimately with distance, with desire and with discomfort. While we can't stop looking, or stop wanting to turn and see where that feeling of being watched is coming from, we also can't always find words to describe these non-interactions. So we go to Intimate Distance, in the glass gallery and be seen looking at Clancy's exhibition. Here we realize that we don't need to have words, we all have these experiences and we can all share in the wonderful feeling of looking and the enjoy the discomfort of knowing there are eyes always on you in this space.</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>BOSTON GLOBE REVIEW</B></div> <div> By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent  |  July 23, 2003</div> <bR> <div> The portraits in ''Face to Face,'' a three-person show at the Gallery @ Green Street, tell more stories than Alex Katz's portraits do. Where his work is often about veneer, these artists explore what's beneath, and the connections between people. The grouping makes for a delightful show. </div> <bR> <div> Dana Clancy specifically set out to portray people at a party, who are either angry or confused. She has a clever device for guiding the viewer into her space: Each portrait rises within a bubble of color. That orients us and gives Clancy an anchor to create occasionally offbeat perspectives. The woman in ''Search Party II'' wears an orange, cone-shaped party hat positioned at the top of her forehead like a rhinoceros's horn. Portrayed within a red bubble, she narrows her eyes and holds her head down, as if readying for the charge. It's smart, funny, and harrowing all at once. </div> <bR> <div>  <STYLE>  </STYLE>  </div> </td> </tr></table></body>