MARY HATCH: NARRATIVE METAPHORS
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At first glance the people populating Hatch’s paintings look ordinary. They could be your next-door neighbors or your office mates. But many of the objects that surround them are quite extraordinary–or extraordinarily out of place. The uncharacteristic colors give everything the unreal quality of a dream, making anything seem possible. Foreign objects are likely to become familiar, and common objects take on uncommon import. Because the people in her paintings are so mundane, so true to life, their silent messages seem even truer. The figures in her paintings usually face the viewer, their gazes often confrontational. It seems they’re about to deliver some kind of message, some kind of oracular truth. At first you might asssume that the message will be something as placid as their poses or as mundane as the things surrounding them. But suddenly you realize that in their arrested postures these figures are like mediums, transferring subconscious messages as boldly as Hatch’s colors do.
Take War Games. Five chubby, smiling babies on a blanket, and two more cut off by the frame. How Norman Rockwell. But then you notice their vacuous faces–and that the blanket they’re sitting on is the American flag. Suddenly their toys and clothes seem symbolic: the uniform gray they wear, the relish with which one chomps on a helicopter. These cherubic but somehow threatening babies are going to grow up, girls and boys alike, to be soldiers and generals. Among the blood-red toy jeeps and tanks are Red Cross trucks–and suddenly those two babies cut off at the top seem corpselike, casualties of war. These young innocents staring out–fresh fodder “for God and country”–remind us of our own powerlessness to stop the machinery of war. A bright red ribbon runs horizontally in front of the babies, separating them from the viewer as if they were a museum exhibit. Or is it a trail of blood, the thread of history?
In Madonna, a contemporary-looking icon stands before the door of her house (painted a bright blue, like the color of David Hockney’s swimming pools). A flag peeps from the barely opened door, and in the background the idyllic landscape includes a large shade tree and a car parked beneath it; there’s another tidy house in the distance. Suddenly the woman’s patriotic innocence becomes suspect–you notice that the house has an odd wire frame before the door and a blood red shape inside it, above the hint of a flag. This pale schoolgirl with her blood red clothes and bangs, dripping like trails of blood down her forehead, an odd red splotch next to her eye, could be a modern-day Lizzie Borden. The blue house could hide morbid secrets. The electric blue X crossing the girl’s jacket, though it suggests the straps to a bookbag, is also reminiscent of a straitjacket. The shadows on the building’s walls begin to look menacing, skeletal–two of them on the door could be macabre figures dancing. Or maybe this is just a girl with a red rubber band in her palm, the proverbial “string” tied around her finger to remind her to close the door.
