Review: Georganne Deen’s “When I Was a Riot of Spring” at Bale Creek Allen Gallery, Fort Worth

We are born into a dark sea, the unconscious — our skins are the shore. The way toward land begins at birth. From there it’s a long walk, but land legs may be found with work and love. We embrace others and at times careen off our paths like planets experiencing sudden and fugitive gravitational anomalies. Sometimes terrible things happen, opening trap doors of reaction that blur vision and obscure purpose. Pain is a snare that tends to create more pain. 

Georganne Deen was frank, vulnerable, and courageous as she read from the manuscript of her book Under the Night Train following the opening of her show, When I Was a Riot of Spring, at Bale Creek Allen Gallery in Fort Worth.

Those in attendance heard a story of horrifying tragedy — a nightmare of failure, disappointment, misunderstanding, and betrayal in a family beset by societal presumptions and expectations, and the need to look away from issues of mental health, which Deen refers to as “the story of the minotaur who is eating the youth of Athens.”

There is an internal structure in a life that is matched in story. Ancient mythology grows in the same ground; ground that is tilled by unforeseen events. That is where the story is seeded.

At age 17, Deen was weighted by a depression, long fed by family dynamics, but unawares. She considered suicide and was told by a spirit, “You know you won’t be able to get off the train by doing this.” Why? “Because you are the train.” 

A moment comes: 

“I was trying to find words that might trigger a useful response from [my parents] when my sister unexpectedly came home from college with what sounded like a manic-depressive breakdown.”

Deen openly indicts her own teenage inability to grasp the gravity of the terrible ordeal her sister would then endure in a sanitarium.

Under the Night Train is also the title of the painting that will serve as the cover of the book.

These words from the book are scrawled on the painting:

“Knowing you’ll never deliver the magic whatever it was you thought you were bringing to this wretched world? Knowing you’ll continue to disappoint yourself & everybody else, but there’s not another train coming? Is that a good enough reason to want to end your life?”

The canine visage of the figure in Under the Night Train (2024) bears a closed-mouth, self-satisfied expression, with fangs overlapping the bottom lip, hinting at an unaware obliviousness. The closed eyes add to this effect. The sense of too much self-protection is emphasized by the Elizabethan collar that veterinarians employ to keep dogs from licking their own wounds. A black string tie auspiciously secures the opening of the cone to her neck and seems to presume its own efficacy. Knee-length tresses emerge from the collar and drape her back and legs. She is dressed in a black gown of the kind that might be worn in a fairy tale, royal court, or masque ball. 

The full moon, constructed of cut paper circles concentrically placed on a flattened, fluted candy cup, shines brightly and casts shadows of the gown and of a tenuously clutched cane. Atop a sheer cliff, the night train passes, with brightly lit windows that simultaneously convey emptiness and the presence of ghostly passengers. Bats careening down the cliff face swarm to complete the gothic tone of the scene.

In Secretary of Education eavesdropping on her brother in the Caymans (2019), a crimson de Chirico listening bubble holds a dreamscape in which a lone person stands at the edge of an abyss. The bubble cantilevers from the shades of a 21st century yacht lady stirring a cocktail of neglect with twig-hands. Both arms grow from the right side of her body, like suckers on the trunk of a tree. The figure by the abyss seems not seen.

She looks back at the viewer with insectoid disdain from behind opaque Jackie Os that reflect the décor, as a faceted column bordering the right edge of the painting adds an air of stylish nonchalance, though the space in the painting is a brushy, void-of-form beige. She hovers without feet, as if struggling to complete herself, and almost slithers, unconcerned.

The Red Nun (2015) is another gowned figure, with matching habit, studded dog collar, and cuff bracelets. On first glance she appears to blithely pluck a black harp upon a cloud, waiting to ascend as if a cartoon angel. Her ample schnoz rivals the length of her Cruella De Vil cigarette holder. The painterly appearance of the harp entwines the artist’s paint handling skills with the entanglement of the nun’s hands in the strings of the harp, which are not harp strings at all, but booze bottles and packaged comfort food (cool whip, Häagen-Dazs, chocolate syrup), hanging like DIY wind chimes within the frame of the harp. 

Both hands are snagged in the suspended collection, but the fingers of one hand become tendrils that mimic the mess of string that snarls the other. The bottle and container images are cut-outs from magazines collaged into the painting. A spider dangles among them, her web occupying the space near the harp’s crown point. Figure and harp are supported by the cloud, which is emblazoned with the tag “How long do I have to play???” The scene takes place within a green bubble, the edge of which is surmounted with the words “Dear God,” painted in Deen’s typically shaky font with harlequin shadows granting dimension to the letters. “Inside of a woman is a fallen nun” is penciled on the wall next to the painting.

Even given the apparition of One Who Knows (shaman) (2018), When I was a Riot of Spring (2024) probably presents the strangest of Deen’s physiognomies. These two works bear another similarity, possibly because of the congruence of weirdness already stated. These are the two that least resemble characters in a story, the two that most seem to be representations of a state of being or emotional vibration.

One Who Knows (shaman) offers a hallucinudge in the direction of ritual, which is a serious engagement for the artist outside the studio. These paintings are not therapy. Deen’s work on herself has followed a path of directed inner work which includes forgiveness. Her art is not that path, but is a story alongside it, revealing to artist and viewer alike. 

The creature in When I was a Riot of Spring seems perched on the verge of a shimmy or a quiver. Freshly aqueous, but also rooted like a plant, her spreading panoptes ganglia pucker and almost smile. Her dangling simian-length arms are tipped with mopish swishers that seem to pause. The slight tilt of her head to the right conveys gentle concern. Her hair drapes like a mop wigging up a fence post. A tiny sea turtle masquerading as a clippy climbs her locks and is intent upon its natal beach. The center of the figure is a void in which the head and torso are joined by a single slab of brown above an asparagus green mono-leg. It’s impossible to know how a person could paint her way to this figure without residing in a very specific inner posture. For the rest of us it’s a rite of gorgeous intrigue.

Deen’s wicked humor is everywhere in her work, and balances the seductive strangeness of it. This friendliness grants an opening for viewers to check in on their own aliens. It is a generous way to share darkness that is also within it. Her phantasmagoria of characters and her very specific poet-hand give the feeling of inclusion as if we, the viewers, might be in on something, though not in a winking way. We too have our stories.

Many of the paintings are festooned with gestural edges and corner filigree as if from the fronts piece of an old-fashioned book. Square-li-cues are well seen in When I was a Riot of Spring, hand adorned as if drawn from irony-aware greeting cards from the other side or opulent datebooks of a bygone era. In It never entered my mind (2023), this aspect manifests as heraldry and vine-like ratchety scritchglyphs on the brink of representation. It’s a graphic sensibility every bit as original and recognizable as a sequence of movie title cards by Saul Bass.

Some art throws up a façade. Some art rejects the personal. Georganne Deen’s art does neither. If surrender is the best way into the creative endeavors of another, then artists who offer vulnerability match that with openness. 

I can’t wait for the book to come out.

 

Georganne Deen, When I was a Riot of Spring is on view at Bale Creek Allen Gallery in Fort Worth through April 30, 2024.