New Mexico artist J Mehaffey is known for building a rich impasto of wax, tar, and gold leaf on her canvases and sculptures, then digging back through the layers, like an archeologist of her own vision, unveiling suggestive, reverberant meanings and patterns that she has both created and disguised.
But never has she had quite such an evocative subject matter as in her new body of work, Charred/Remains, opening November 21, 2008, at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art in the Railyard District in Santa Fe. The multi-layered collages in her new show incorporate materials from the renovation of the gallery space itself.
The gallery’s new, gut-renovated building at 435 South Guadalupe has had multiple, earlier lives (as has Ms. Mehaffey, who came to her art career in mid-life, after raising a family). All of which struck Ms. Mehaffey, as she walked through the space last year, as richly metaphoric. Spotting some charred wooden beam—evidence of a long-ago fire—she begged to have several of them set aside. Conflagration, transformation, reuse, and recovery are implied themes in her paintings, and she had the opportunity now, she felt, to represent them both suggestively and literally.
Look closely at the work in Charred/Remains, and you will see the actual remnants of the ashen beams, which Mehaffey salvaged, then laboriously cut into 11” x 11” squares and sealed, before painting them with her signature, collage-like layers. The wood, in this form, holds shadows of its own past, as well as visions of the creativity, hope, energy, and meanings that exist in art itself, and that certainly will be celebrated in Zane Bennett’s new gallery. Her work in this show, Mehaffey says, “honors the building’s history, while casting a blessing onto the new gallery’s future.”
Charred/Remains will open at Zane Bennett on November 21, 2008. The show will remain in place until January 3, 2009.
