April, 2005

Robin Ward at Lisa Dent Gallery

On first look at Robin Ward's Otherkin paintings, what quickly comes to mind are Alfred Tennyson's lines describing the “mild-eyed melancholy Lotus-Eaters” being deep asleep… yet all awake.” In Ward's paintings and drawings at Lisa Dent Gallery, listless animals occupy ascetic anti-landscapes in a kind of morphine inertia of private oneirism and collective isolation. Sparse numbers of horses, Japanese macaques, elephants, hippopotamuses, sloth and occasionally, people phlegmatically model a comforatable, diluted awareness amongst nothingness.

The sequence in The Odyssey , from which Tennyson's poem is derived, describes the plant of the Lotos-Eaters which compels Ulysses's men to dispense with all cares for friends, home and purpose. In the first picture of the Otherkin exhibition, Light Snow Deep Enough for Walking , a single snow monkey bares her swollen circumanal skin to two potential breeding mates who stolidly ignore her. A few arboreal primates, fragilely plump on skinny branches overhead like overripe fruit about to drop, punctuate the isolation of the animals' ambivalence.

Butterflies appear systematically throughout the exhibit as a symbolic vehicle of rapture and escape. Traditionally in many countries and religions, butterflies signify rebirth or represent the freed soul itself. Reflecting the three stages of their life cycle, these insects characterize metamorphosis and the ephemeral condition of happiness. In Butterfairy , the notion of being spirited away is given explicit parabolic form using a swarm of butterflies that remove a woman from the absentminded stares of a crowd, her face sheer as a wig mannequin. If Butterfairy is the moment of capture, Aerodynamics of the Swarm depicts the nature of this captivity, which is moot. The willing, indoctrinated prisoner shown here is a horse, which callously submits to being suspended and nearly completely encased in a nest of butterflies. This is the most diagrammatic image of the show's theme.

In Frost on a Living Surface , the butterflies surround the tendrils of a tree trunk, but upon closer inspection they appear to be just as equally contained by this inlayed fissure in the white landscape. The chalky sinkhole environments of Ward's paintings are themselves the central organisms of assimilation and enclosure, akin to the body captivity of a butterfly chrysalis. These spaces fill their occupants, looking like a dense smoke, but more viscous. Acute and aggressive, in Ward's images the backgrounds obscure or eliminate most parts of the animals mired within this consensual, unconditional embrace. There are few exceptions to the placid and docile expressions of the animals, but significantly so in Who Drives the Horses of the Sun , where a network of overlapping horse heads panic within a tight vacuous frame.

And then Boris Karloff shows up. The non sequiter of Frankenflutter introduces a fitting personification of Ward's concept of moving dead-like things, even if he's retro-dressed as a Halloween orange Sonny Crockett. Here is the classic horror Lazarus creature curiously leaning back and batting away at a group of butterflies. He is the awkward dissenter of the exhibit, perhaps because of the otherworldly reanimation that already defines his existence. If the butterflies are truly meant to be souls of the dead, Frankenstein's resentment is for the humanity he can never attain, much less have the option of withdrawing from.

Ward's exhibit has only a shy connection to the beliefs held by a group from which the show draws its name. “Otherkin” is a title used by people who believe that they are actually inhuman, whether spiritually or literally, and that their human appearance is a protective costume over their true identity, which can be anything from a mythical creature out of a medieval bestiary to traditional livestock from a petting zoo, to a Martian from outer space. What appears to be the most salient concept here for Ward is what Otherkin call “yearning,” which is the urge to return to another dimension or place in the universe to which they feel they more appropriately belong.

What Ward arrives at is an allegory of flight risk, and not a martyrology in any sense. The effectiveness of this is due in no small part to the way she unforcefully renders her subjects, as if they were private notebook illustrations. Her sense of spatial weight is unmethodical, and is paired with a fittingly conservative palette of colors and tones. Unpretentious and feminine, Ward's Otherkin is coercive and speaks clearly of the hollows of the mind and its cravings for the Twilight Zone.

—Jordan Essoe