Amy Bird's paintings of surfers capture a distinctly Californian idyll. Her paintings of field laborers, while equally specific, are rooted in an entirely different reality. They hang as counterweights to one another, caught and balanced in a dialectic of leisure and labor, of boundless play and bounded toil.
While the surfer and strawberry picker paintings circle around a series of contradictions central to imaginings of California, nowhere do they accommodate cliché: Heaven or hell? Sunshine or noir? Bird's California landscapes occupy a far more uncertain terrain. The paintings take the contradictions of the place as their very subject, tracing the network of relations that generate the social and political landscape of the Golden State. The leisure of the coast is enabled and supported by the labor of the interior. The landscape is never simply natural, but always an economic or ideological construct-imagined, invented, imposed, and projected.
Bird's paintings are mostly monochromatic. Flattened out, voided, drained of all affect, Bird's surfer and field worker paintings are evocative but wholly subdued, almost vacant. The figures are at once clearly defined but also fugitive and immaterial, threatening to give way to the ground against which they are painted, to disappear entirely as they slide into their surround
If the surfer and field worker pictures are observations of a present day paradox, Bird's paintings of tents in the woods contain their own opposition of past and present within a single frame. In the tent paintings, canvas tents float as luminous bodies on vertical bars of chromatically specific forest colors. The registration of dappled sunlight is done as line work that becomes lace-like in its complexity. These un-peopled mountain encampments trouble our notions of the wilderness as a site of recreation by reminding us of a time when the American West was fearsome and wild, and camping was not an activity of leisure but a hardship imposed by circumstance. The work's relationship to historical Western landscape painting is further bolstered by a series of watercolors based on American Sublime master paintings.
- Jonathon Feldman