“New Work,” a collaboration at Whitney Art Works between mother Judith Allen and daughter Eirene Efstathiou, is a joy to unpack. Traces of personality, connections of familiarity, and deeply woven universality are laid bare for the viewer. Both women speak strongly, articulately, and wisely from their different vantage points of age and culture such that each artist’s work merits her own show. All the more enjoyable that we can see the two side by side in the comfortable vulnerability of familial context.
Efstathiou’s “39/45/80” is a triptych family portrait. Three small canvases each represent the societal specters of each member’s birth date as rendered in a brooding grayscale palette. Overblown photographic reproductions in oil and acrylic feel more like dream than reality. The artist emphasizes the cognitive separation by limiting the action to the right two-thirds of the frame with a flat gray field filling the left third. In the first, a man dives from a high ladder as part of a circus act, perhaps representing nation states of the time plunging themselves into a world war. “45” depicts a glowing explosion distant in a landscape, most likely the result of emerging nuclear technologies. The birth date of the artist is represented by the aftermath of a terrorist bombing.
Meanwhile, Efstathiou’s mother is exploring a potential solution. Allen’s “Healer” series stretches out over two gallery walls in order to represent the medicine women of Appalachia, including a distant relative. Intermittent images of healer women, colorized on the canvas in monochromatic red, are set apart by soft focus, close-ups of medicinal plants most often set in a complementary green hue. The sequence of paintings reads like a dossier, partly due to Allen’s process of using a Xerox machine as a lithographic tool. The result is a highly contrasted image, a style that seems to run in the family.
Healing is no doubt necessary in our current age, but what if everyone is too distracted to notice they are hurting? “Finos Finale” is a sequence of five panel paintings by Efstathiou. Each painting contains pixelated action from a television screen, cropped in such a way as to reveal part of the screen’s edges. The outer panels are catastrophic stills of protest and uprising. The inner three images, by contrast, relay bourgeois parlor scenes from a cinema of propaganda. The one-way conversation of the screen not only involves the domestic soap operas hell-bent to entertain the viewer into complacency, but also the appropriated newsreel footage that abstracts the reality of strife.
Allen chooses not to focus on this virtual existence, but her themes are still concerned with mediation. “The Contents of Corinna’s Handbag” is a sprawling photocopy lithograph depicting a life as represented by objects. From an aerial position, the viewer objectively surveys the signs of a life led: passports, money, tobacco, and keys fill the frame. The composition is reminiscent of an early Cubist collage in that numerals, barcodes and logos are abstracted into the sea of objects. A subjective reaction results as the viewer is forced to call into question exactly what his or her own transient existence will leave behind.
