Spotlight Reviews

Steve DiGiovanni, Mike’s Merlot, oil on canvas, 2003.
Photo: Steve DiGiovanni.

CONNECTICUT

Creative Arts Workshop/New Haven
www.creativeartsworkshop.org
DISCRETE AMERICAN NARRATIVES

The common vision shared by Hank Paper and Steve DiGiovanni can be attributed to their sensitivity to the films they watched and discussed while working together in Paper’s video rental business.
     Paper, mindful of photography’s visual duality with film, asked DiGiovanni, a figurative painter and a teacher at Creative Arts Workshop, to participate in a two-person exhibition at CAW about life in America as we know it today. Discrete American Narratives is the product of this insightful collaboration.
     Fifty-two photographs and twelve fairly large oil paintings make a finely tuned exhibition. They reflect pop art, film noir, performance art, and narrative literature. Both artists’ technical proficiencies in their chosen media helped to narrate their stories effectively.
     Paper’s photographs are grouped in series beside DiGiovanni’s paintings, and their overlapping meanings enhance each other’s individual meanings. Paper’s Wings is an image of a girl seated in a coffee shop. Large, tattooed wings cover most of her back. The image is adjacent to a painting of two bare-chested men seated at a kitchen table with a woman in the background. One man’s face, arms, and chest are tattooed with Maori–like designs. It is unclear what these men are talking about or what their relationship is to the woman. Are the tattoos in each work symbols? If so, what might both reveal about life in America?

Hank Paper, Mother Instinct, C-print, 20 x 24. Photo: Hank Paper.

     DiGiovanni’s paintings deliberately foster a sense of ambiguity. The viewer doesn’t know exactly what is happening to the figures in each picture or where the specific scenario is taking place. The interaction between the figures, as well as the scruffy paint handling and ominous lighting, leaves most of these paintings with an unsettling sense of gloom and anxiety.
     In contrast to DiGiovanni’s painted narratives, Paper’s photographs often identify the specific place where they were taken. And while many of DiGiovanni’s paintings are untitled, Paper’s titles are funky and offbeat, frequently leaving clues to the photograph’s meaning. Role Model shows a young girl in a sweet, flower-patterned dress standing on the deck of a ferry. She is observing a photo shoot of a seductively posed model in tight jeans and a low-cut blouse. The Statue of Liberty stands in the background.
     Many of Paper’s photographs reveal the connection between contemporary fashion and American culture: women posed in front of Victoria’s Secret or attired in revealing dresses, bridal gowns, sailor uniforms, or the shortest, tightest of skirts. Some photographs make you laugh; others make you nostalgic. Some are erotic; some mystical. Some are pathetic; some quirky.
     Paradoxically, the concept of American life being open to diversity and change—a primary organizing principle behind this exhibition—makes the show’s title relevant but the totality of its images anachronistic.

Lois Goglia

Also reviewed in this issue:

Christine Bresline: The Elizabeth Park Series at 100 Pearl Street Gallery
Paintings by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri at the New Britain Museum of American Art