TERRI ZUPANC
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Zupanc’s paintings show she knows the plain, unvarying terrain of the rural midwest inside out (not surprising for an artist originally from Wisconsin who’s lived in Chicago since 1977). In this new work she explores it in its muddiest, drabbest, most joyless guise. Most of these untitled paintings (all but one are from 1993) function more as generalized evocations than as particular views of particular places, and each contains odd, unexplainable elements that push the image into the realm of the unreal.
One work in the show features a large square of sky over a low swath of land. It looks at first like a rather straightforward rendering of an undisturbed boggy plain. The earth is a dull brownish green, the sky a dingy gray–nothing unusual for an overcast midwinter day. But a few elements tip the balance toward the strange: one is a narrow, boomerang-shaped body of yellow gray water. Neither reflecting the sky nor traveling back in space to a distant source or into the foreground, it’s a lonely image that speaks of disconnection and isolation.
Zupanc appears to be at a crossroad, moving more toward realism yet wanting to retain a degree of abstraction. Because she hasn’t decided which direction to take her paintings hedge their bets, giving with one hand but taking away with the other. And while they’re beautifully painted–she’s certainly doing more with color–they’re also repetitious. It can be argued–as Rothko did–that something worth doing once is worth repeating, but it’s also instructive to consider that, having painted himself into a corner, Rothko ended his life in despair. Two of Zupanc’s paintings in this show have almost exactly the same composition–only the color of the sky and land varies. Hanging side by side, they produce an effect of numbing monotony even for a viewer who relishes the quiet and the subtle.
