Conflicting emphases highlight works in Prospectus Two

“Prospectus Two- Keith Dull and Elizabeth Hanemann”

Now through April 9…

“Prospectus Two- Keith Dull and Elizabeth Hanemann”

Now through April 9

Brew House Space 101

2100 Mary Street, Pittsburgh 115203

(412) 381-7767

“Mary Crow Dog” is a girl. She has a young, Native American face, and her long, black hair falls down over her torso in a shiny mass that reaches the top of her pleated skirt. Her bare right arm and left leg are plump and supple.

But “Mary Crow Dog” is more than just a girl. Under her long, dark hair is a void: She has no torso, only the suggestion of breasts in the way her hair curves over her should-be chest. And her right leg isn’t a girl’s leg at all, but a bird’s leg. Her left arm is wrinkled, contorted, and you can all but see the nail shoved through the cupped palm that would attach it to the cross. She has wings. She wears a thin, gold, thorny crown.

What is this mixture of girl, bird and Christ? Elizabeth Hanemann describes all her works in the Brew House’s current Prospectus Two exhibit, like this piece, as explorations of identity. “My work is the self-examination of cultural identity,” she writes in her artist statement. “I started to analyze identity as a more general social institution, crossing boundaries of religion, gender, and sex. My iconography is an amalgam of Native culture and Western religion.”

“Mary Crow Dog” is representative of Hanemann’s works. In each of her lithographs or mono-prints, there is a deep examination of female, Native American and Christian identities to show the complexity of one’s existence and explore the implications of being not just one thing, but all of these things at once.

These interesting tensions are created, in part, through Hanemann’s appropriation of religious iconography from famous Italian Renaissance works with Native American symbols. By placing pieces of such long venerated and studied works beside contemporary, Native American symbols, Hanemann compounds their traditions to form a completely new association. Each of her many pieces creates complex, yet accessible, identity questions in minimal but powerful, compositions.

In contrast, the prints by Keith Dull, the second contributor to Prospectus Two, are all alive with detail, but seem to carry less weight than Hanemann’s. “My imagery is designed to draw cultural comparisons between the past and present,” Dull writes in his artist statement. He wants to re-infuse the print medium with the force and influence of pre-Renaissance times, he says. And while this is an exciting idea, it’s difficult to find where or even if Dull achieves this goal. His works are thought-provoking in their decorative and abstract qualities, but give few clues to let you in on their meanings, and therefore, the depth which Dull proscribes to them.

For example, in his “Sylvan Witan” series, which he says deals with “imagery relating to the traditions and beliefs of negotiations along the Pennsylvania frontier during the eighteenth century,” his symbolism is mostly inaccessible. In each work of this eight-canvas series, a central print figure is surrounded by a bright, even iridescent, field of paint, and stands within a geometrically decorated border that is nearly as thick as the space allotted for the figure. In some cases, the border contains strips of shiny fabric or glitter to match the color scheme of the particular canvas. However, there is little to suggest the historic meaning that Dull attributes to the series.

Similar things could be said of his “Vanir” relief series. Each of the four canvases has a playing card-like composition of a heroic figure encircled by bright, curving fields of color. Each figure stands above squared-off spaces which contain empty speech bubbles like in a comic strip. His bright and expressive colors, comic-strip-like composition, and the raised, “bumpy” surfaces, harken to works by artists like Roy Lichtenstein, and are nearly as exciting and entertaining to view. Unfortunately, Dull’s prints lack a corresponding profundity.

However, that is not to discard them. Dull’s works are like a “Mary Crow Dog” in their own way. They appear as geometric decoration, figural print and abstract symbol all at once. Each aspect plays off another to create compositions that are, indeed, unique and perplexing. The amalgamation of his compositions, and of Elizabeth Hanemann’s works, is worth a thorough consideration – whether or not their visions are fully realized.