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By Anne Galloway Times Argus Staff
Lynn
Rupe’s paintings look like the aftermath of a train
wreck that was meant to happen. Her paintings are pure chaos. Familiar shapes
are painted together in no particular order. Highway lines, bridges, ovals,
staircases, railroad tracks, parking lots, and weirdly familiar organic forms
all converge on large panels like a chutes and ladders game board gone awry.
In
a new show, “Pieces of my Mind” at the Vermont Arts Council’s Spotlight
Gallery, which runs through June 27, Rupe has displayed individual panels from
the large, complex puzzle-like installations she assembles. The gallery, which
consists of a conference room and hallway in VAC’s
small office space, simply can’t accommodate her 13-by-7 foot acrylic on wood
panel installations.
But
even this small taste gives you a feeling for her larger works. In “M.L.
Pandora’s Warehouse and Furnace Company,” Rupe intersperses the familiar – bits
and pieces of the urban landscape – with a bizarre, kaleidoscope-like
perspective. The black background gives the painting an ominous feeling, as
though wherever there is blank space the artist meant to create little black
holes. Sweeping parallel lines form highways, aerial views of parking lots,
roller coaster tracks, ribbons of red and orange
color, and staircases that go nowhere.
The
result is a visually noisy image that up close seems to give the viewer
iconographic clues to latch onto like floating dollar bills, a smokestack, a
blue squiggly worm, etc., that are totally unconnected.
Back
away from it and these smaller images become like details in a totally abstract
painting. These multiple perspectives add to the absurdity and placelessness of the piece.
Rupe’s
technique is purely intuitive, stream-of-conscious abstraction. She says
there’s no blueprint, no conscious approach to the paintings.
“I’m
not trying to paint a puzzle, I’m standing in front of a large surface making
marks,” Rupe says. “I keep looking at what’s there and keep changing it until
it looks done to me. I just stay with it.” She keeps working broad,
bird’s-eye-view themes in miniature – staircases, ovals, highways, parking
lots, eyes, figure eights – in no particular order until she feels it’s done
I
experience it as though someone else made it . That’s when I know it’s done,” Rupe says.
“It’s
Rupe’s self-imposed objectification, her conscious
effort to create a disconnect between the shapes,
their interpretation and juxtaposition that makes you feel as though you’ve
just stepped into a horribly recognizable mess. Rupe has a way of making this
melee of arbitrarily repeated nonsensical images seem like a metaphor for
modern life.
Lynn Rupe’s
“Pieces of my Mind” is on exhibit, through June 27, at the Vermont Arts
Council’s Spotlight Gallery,