JOAN VAUPEN: "Retrospective" December 3, 2009

Reception on Sunday, December 6, from 1 to 3 p.m. Conversation with the Artist: 2 p.m.

LA Artcore is proud to announce a retrospective exhibition of Southern Californian artist Joan Vaupen.

Vaupen finished her graduate degree in painting from California State University, Los Angeles almost forty years ago. Since then, she has pursued several discreet bodies of work. This retrospective, covering her oeuvre since the 1970’s, includes examples of work from eight different series. Many of them address her progressive political concerns while others investigate color and form.

While still a graduate student, Vaupen began the group of large paintings in which she investigated the physical and psychical limitations imposed upon us by various social institutions. Using pale tones, she turned her critical eye to everything from the deadening anonymity of secretarial offices to the quasi-military attire donned by young students. At the same time, Vaupen was producing small-scale landscapes, building up subtle washes of watercolor and revealing both her delicate touch and what was to be an ongoing interest in the way we see the planet. This interest resurfaced in the early years of this millennium in Vaupen’s Banners and Folds series. She employed photographs—sometimes taken from her front porch, sometimes appropriated from satellite shots – and converted them into vertical format fabric flags richly pigmented with dye-sublimation ink. Then she paired the banners with circles of plexiglass that were folded over in order to double and thereby mystify the images. One banner depicts the United Arab Emirates seen from the sky. What appear to be deep orange islands in the midnight blue sea are actually the pools or petroleum that enrich and complicate the land.

Vaupen pushed the folding of plexiglass further in a series of small sculptures that in shape resemble Chinese fortune cookies. Again, she began with a disc, embedded photographic imagery, and then heated and folded the plexiglass to develop the desired forms. Sometimes almost Op Art in their twisting black and white stripes, at other times graced by moiré patterns, the “cookies” have a jewel-like presence.

Vaupen had begun working with plexiglass in the early 1990’s, when she initiated a series of Small Houses – rounded plexiglass boxes that she filled with objects and images to construct commentaries about issues that troubled her, and us. One of her Houses looks at the atom bomb and includes a vintage photograph of an American admiral and his non-military female companion cutting into a celebratory cake. The cake is shaped like a mushroom cloud. Another of Vaupen’s Houses compares a depiction of three Barbie dolls dancing with the lithe bodies in Bottecelli’s Three Graces and the bodacious ones in a Ruben’s painting.

The Small Houses can be considered assemblage sculptures of a sort. Vaupen also creates assemblage work outside of her plexiglass containers. One assemblage pairs the jockey and horse of a Ralph Lauren Polo display with a Haitian sculpture of a man riding a galloping stallion. The artist titled it Race, an ironic reference to horse races as well as to the troubled racial relations in this hemisphere.

In early 2000, Vaupen saw some titanium in a friend’s house. Ever eager to explore new materials and mew techniques, she began creating wall pieces using that very space-age metal. Some of the layered reliefs have a restrained geometric configuration that is stylistically Deco. Others have been heated so that the titanium oxidizes and turns sumptuous hues.

Most recently, Vaupen has been dropping and pouring paint, and pushing it around the surface of paper with her fingers. In some of her Moving Paint series, the handsome contrast of liquid pigment recalls the mature work of Helen Frankenthaler. Other examples echo the Northern Lights or the depths of the ocean.

Vaupen’s work reminds us that art is a complicated activity. Creating art is hard work. Responding to art, even beautiful art, is often challenging.

Since we humans first endeavored to grapple with ideas about art and beauty, we have had to acknowledge the conflicted nature of the task. In one of Plato’s dialogues, he argued that beauty in not merely that which “makes us feel joy through hearing and sight.” Instead he said, “beautiful things are difficult.”

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