By Mary Louise Schumacher for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Aug. 11, 2007
In the way that children may beg to hear again and again about Red Riding Hood's journey into the woods - as if the girl's encounter with the Big Bad Wolf might somehow change - Gina Litherland's surrealist paintings seduce us to keep looking.
Like the fairy tales that inspired them, they are simple stories, with extreme plot twists and much hidden within them. These delicate, Renaissance-style paintings, on view at the Haggerty Museum of Art, give our imaginations room to maneuver.
Dining on the surface of the moon or inhabiting the sea, among other things, the characters in Litherland's paintings are not governed by the physical laws of nature. Instead, the characters seem to exist in a preternatural symbiosis with it.
In "Nerrivik," for instance, a mythical, Inuit protectress vainly primps at the bottom of the sea. She holds up her pink mirror and runs her tiny comb through her head of hair, which is as expansive as the sea itself.
According to Inuit lore, she was so insufferably caught up in herself that her parents tossed her into the ocean.
Litherland's Nerrivik is not a simple character. She's solitary, strong, hard-headed and ultimately nurturing.
Even while admiring her reflection, with her mouth pursed as if in a kiss, a world of fantastical sea creatures takes up residence within her flowing locks, swaying toward the surface like an underwater field of kelp. Schools of fish dart in and out of her hair, some peering up at her, and groups of seals frolic in it.
Her strange synthesis with the natural world betrays a belief that is a constant in Litherland's work - that human beings are an extension of the natural world rather than distinctly removed consumers of it.
Incongruous and strange objects present themselves in "Nerrivik" and the exhibit's other paintings, each like a pungent little novella unto itself and inspired by poetry, literature, film and music of many sorts.
With continued viewing, one can see things such as a hand reaching out of the ocean floor holding a box, a sea plant with an eye, a swimming horse and eels with human faces.
Litherland's brushwork itself invites discovery. Her painting is driven by her own curiosity and envelopes elements of chance into an otherwise tightly controlled approach.
With a Max Ernst-inspired complication, she presses various textures, such as plastic wrap, paper or leaves, into loose pools of paint on her canvases, and then paints back into and over the works. The technique, called decalcomania, is done repeatedly, working layer over layer, which gives her oil paintings a visual depth and finespun quality.
I asked myself why I responded to Litherland's work differently than I did to the work of Alaska-based artist Annie Aube, whose work is on view at the Hotcakes Gallery.
The figures in Aube's embroidery works also evoke familiar fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood, sometimes quite literally. And I do like the irony Aube is after. She's reclaiming a "female" handicraft that at least historically was considered an alternative to the intellectual pursuits of men.
And she's doing it her way with crude, wide stitches and a not-at-all pretty style that are the antithesis of refinement. Fine. Nice twist. (Though I think the wrinkles could have been ironed out of the fabric.)
What both artists do is upset our expectations, as art often does.
But Aube's form of upset strikes me as a very legitimate but straightforward expression of feminine angst, while Litherland's level of personal involvement seems deeper, her selection of historical art and literary juxtapositions richer and more poetic.
From Aube, we get a particular point of view; from Litherland, a hint at a complex world view incorporating ideas about many things - our need for and fear of the natural world, the solitary nature of every life, the purpose of myth, and the wild and sometimes savage ways of the imagination.
