The Birds and the Bees: Jenny Eggleston at Artspace

Jenny Eggleston’s Tulips is a lively little  show.  It is a radiant, cheerful affair which in its bold color and approachable subject matters seems almost to exist solely to brighten up the day.   I took to heart the artist’s marvelous drawing technique which is for me the real cause for marvel and greatest strength in the show.   She is classically trained as a nature illustrator and the rigor of her draftsmanship and technique is on display in full force.  The work alternates between exquisite graphite drawings of various fauna, plant forms and an assorted bird or two and sunshiny yellow collages and paintings that often incorporate poetic snippets pasted up in a  curious ransom note style.  Bees has an underlying honeycomb structure drawn in underneath layered smatterings of honey-like colors so coarsely applied that touch the nerve endings once you look beyond the initial surface markings.  The tactility calls forth her embedded process which seem to echo the overtones of thought that must be running through the artist’s head.

My main complaint is that there is a bit too much regularity in the show’s hanging.  For all the deft ability and marvelous skill with the pencil on display, the drawings and paintings alternate rhythm and placement across the gallery in such predictable patterns and symmetry that they detract from the show’s overall delight and impact.  In her statement the artist notes the special place that orifices and voids have in her work.   She wants us to read between the plants as it were, looking into the spaces in between her forms for the real clues to her intent and inner workings.  I did find I was drawn into the work in this regard and wanted to search through for such traces though a little less of the installational regularity would have helped increase such engagement for sure.

Jenny Eggleston’s show is on view at Artspace in downtown Raleigh through May 29, 2010