Light takes time to reach us—real time, and nothing is faster. Consider that when you read accounts of space aliens traversing untold light years merely to leave a momentary flash in the sky.
And yet it does come quickly to Stacy Lynn Waddell, reflecting back from her work as well, at Candice Madey through October 28. It reflects out from real or imagined portraits, landscapes, and flowers. You might think that nothing can stop or divert its path, no more than one can stop time. As a bonus, though, she steps back in time to older art and African American histories. Together with a recent report on silver and blackness in Tarkiku Shiferaw, it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.
Waddell takes that opening phrase for her show’s title and renders it in cursive in neon, actual if not natural light. It looks all the more impressive in a photograph on the gallery’s Web site, where the necessary exposure time allows a cloud of light to form around its letters. The rest of the show leaves it implicit and loses something in reproduction, like most decent art. She works in gold and silver leaf, along with other metals, on canvas. Silvery threads contribute delicate tracery in low relief. One could almost hold the loose bundles of flowers in one’s hands, only that might kill them or kill the light.
The tracery also makes the flowers seem like living, growing things. If their titles speak instead of birds, one might as well accept their strangeness. Landscapes are flatter, like paintings, and the metal fills earth, trees, and sky with ghostly colors. Waddell is all but drawing with light. It is hard not to wonder at how she does it. Landscape can seem alive, too, and it can be no coincidence that a river may wind right through the center. Still, these are genre paintings, in a fine, familiar tradition.
Forget UFOs who never stop to ask, “take me to your leader.” This is not space travel but time travel. Waddell is fond, she says, of nineteenth-century American art, and she seems more interested in the practice of landscape than the sublime of the Hudson River School. Hilly compositions evoke, if anything, painters who never quite made the grade, despite deep red circles in a yellow sky. Many are circular paintings, or tondos, another bow to tradition. A close-up of flowers has more than enough ancestors, too, like Georgia O’Keeffe in oil or Ruth Asawa in watercolor.
Her favorite, though, is Winslow Homer, and she mentions his scene of the Bahamas after a storm. I have trouble seeing it in her work, but she does subordinate light and drawing to the mundane work of cleaning up after a disaster. The Met recently featured Homer’s The Gulf Stream, a black man alone in a small boat, heroic or doomed, and two more works focus on a black man. He, too, evokes tradition, but a very different one—and I do not overlook the irony of so much light in a show about blackness. He bends his knees and raises his arm in a Caribbean dance. Like the neon, he also returns her art to the present.
He is standing on ceramic floor tile, and he could be dancing in the bathroom. The work’s perspective makes the floor dip sharply down, as another painted surface, and brings the viewer up close. Its awkwardness serves as a useful alternative to the claims of her landscapes. I am half embarrassed to admire them. Still, the light reaches us, and it does not take light years. It shows in the fragile, silvery flowers.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.