{"id":35638,"date":"2018-07-18T12:18:42","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T18:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=35638"},"modified":"2023-10-29T14:37:41","modified_gmt":"2023-10-29T20:37:41","slug":"jennifer-rasmusson-takes-flight-with-new-abstracts-at-a-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jennifer-rasmusson-takes-flight-with-new-abstracts-at-a-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer Rasmusson Takes Flight with New Abstracts at A Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Jennifer Rasmusson, “Clemes,” oil and mixed media on canvas, 2018, 40\u201dw x 40\u201dh<\/p><\/div>\n

There is a neat taking-off trick here: two of Jennifer Rasmusson\u2019s back-in-time representational paintings are here, separated from her New Abstracts<\/em> now filling A Gallery\u2019s white-on-white indoor sky-lit courtyard area.<\/h4>\n

The pre-abstract \u201cCollection of Blues\u201d is eye-level; it\u2019s very large; one bloom is the size of your head. It is many cut flowers, perfectly-in-bloom snipped Asian lilies and daffodils, other \ufb02owers, a pretty array of many small containers suitable for holding only a bloom or two each, close together. They\u2019re all in close-up, right now<\/em> bloom, and all around the vases and the cut blooms are rigid, repeated, perfectly circular patterns, as rigid as Moorish cutouts in a cut-tin lamp or in an airy, giant monocolor design popular now and printed on many rugs and sofa cushions.<\/h4>\n

The semiabstract \u201cSucculent Garden,\u201d also very large, is a growing succulent, but painted \u2014 wonderfully \u2014 from directly overhead, as if we fly in an elf-size plane over it. We feel the jubilant desert sprawl of the succulent cactus plant (blooming, in rangy yellow blooms), feel the freedom of the playful inventive abstractions the painter surrounds it with to the edges of that large canvas, fantastic shapes both sharp and rounded, even the shape of onion domes, Rasmusson radiating the fun of painting this plant this way, from above.<\/h4>\n
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Jennifer Rasmusson, \u201cAberdeen,\u201d oil and mixed media on canvas, 2018, 66\u201dw x 54\u201dh<\/p><\/div>\n

Then she takes off. Begin with the largest abstracts, which greet \u2014 and even frighten you \u2014 as you approach Rasmussen\u2019s collection of work in A Gallery\u2019s sky-lit courtyard. These huge ones are \u2014 urgent. On the left, her huge (66\u201d x 54\u201d) \u201cAberdeen\u201d has black skidding lines urgent to the point of implying race or rescue: these black lines hurl themselves across the canvas, then take a deep joined dip as if it\u2019s now one black \ufb01shing line dropped down at the shore into the ocean. Three fast dashes of color go across the dropped line as if to patch it, urgently, prevent the line\u2019s failing, or breaking. The line continues to ocean \ufb02oor, unbroken, the repairs or forti\ufb01cations apparently successful. What is lurking, silvery-blue, in the back of this enormous painting? An almost-invisible, triple-windowed submarine, glitter in its silver-blue paint, hovering just beyond and back from where the patched line is, ready for rescue?<\/h4>\n

Now the truly fearful one, \u201cDustan,\u201d on the right. It seems to contain a rushing heavy-headed beast, brought to rush to the open entrance of this inner courtyard surrounded by hollow shields, or hollow hills, or charging ghost-hollow shapes of other buffalo-musk-oxen-wildebeests. Blue slashes indicate speed, ferocity. A green cloud seems to weep thick cloud-seeded green rain on the beast.<\/h4>\n
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Jennifer Rasmusson, \u201cDunstan,\u201d oil and mixed media on canvas, 2018, 60\u201dw x 48\u201dh<\/p><\/div>\n

Abstracts may have been stimulated over a hundred years ago by airplane flight \u2014 airplanes which changed our way of thinking, remembering, even, certainly dreaming, greatly changing our whole human experience. Jets and planes move across the sky in arcs, like paintbrushes, sometimes leaving vapid jet trails like a disappearing, transitory paint. Just as the world\u2019s first scheduled flights were happening, across a bay in Florida, between Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg in 1914, some of the first abstract paintings were happening, by Europeans Delaunay, Mertzinger, and Klee, brave as wing-walker aerialists in the nineteen teens.<\/h4>\n

Post-airplane we were more in charge of what we saw, and less in charge. It seemed the sky owned the world, instead of us; the towns below looked like mushroom growths, where we knew no one and they could not see\/know us, either. (A little like the town in north Ontario that Neil Young sang about; dreams took him there; but now for over a hundred years planes have taken us there, too, changed our way of remembering and dreaming, planes that can seem like a hungry monster who took from landscape below our most beloved emotional anchors, replacing them with feverish transitions, reductions.)<\/h4>\n

In dreams, Young\u2019s and others, artists return, as Rasmusson has here, but in her case not north, but south, Ontario: the Dundas Valley School of Art where she studied, on the edge of Lake Ontario, the cities Hamilton, Toronto, and London, Ontario, all nearby. Cities filled with streets with names like \u201cMoorefield,\u201d \u201cEglinton,\u201d \u201cSabine,\u201d \u201cLaurier,\u201d \u201cLauren,\u201d and \u201cOgilvie\u201d \u2014 almost all paintings in this group are named for Canadian streets.<\/h4>\n
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Jennifer Rasmusson, “Notan #73,” mixed media on paper on panel, 2018, 8\u201dw x 10\u201dh<\/p><\/div>\n

The hallmark of Rasmusson\u2019s abstracts are space and movement: her black soaring and falling lines place you in them as if you are an ice skater who dropped from the sky in most of these paintings to dance and skid across waiting ice. Look at me,<\/em> says the black, look how fast I go;<\/em> black here is her color of urgency, and agency, a painter\u2019s return, and summary, on her now-terms, after early years in Canada as an art student. Setting off much of the urgent black are large expanses of creamy white, ameliorated by grayness of smeared charcoal or oil pencil; we are in Canada, after all, where white snow with incredible verve and determination delineates, highlights, muddles landscape, constantly challenging the painter\u2019s eye.<\/h4>\n

In one corner of the courtyard, Rasmusson\u2019s paintings corner you with dim or insistent buttercup yellows, countered by the always-domineering blacks; the six small collages in the \u201cNotan\u201d series, the mixed-media paintings \u201cBirchmount\u201d and \u201cSabine,\u201d are sharply golden or yellow, a yellow that says I am here, and unchangeable, indomitable, solid as Canada.<\/em> The yellow bold expanses are tempered by the also very certain blacks.<\/h4>\n

Green lurks in the paintings, as green lurks underneath all of Canadian winter, waiting to rule the place in summer: green, wherever it appears, is like a candle, waiting to be lit. It\u2019s a heavy green drum waiting to be pounded in the middle of the triptych called \u201cBelfield 1, 2, 3,\u201d all the rest of the triptych dominated by more look-at-me, I\u2019m here<\/em> black. It\u2019s but a fragment in the painting \u201cClemes,\u201d a clothespin-like clamp of green above one pale pink tiny ammonite fossil shape, the green above the ammonite suggesting some urgent or needed magic spell of revival.<\/h4>\n