The Irish artist Alice Maher plunges us into a mythic world, populated with fanciful and grotesque characters, as engrossing as Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” In her recent videos—“film drawings,” as she calls them—sculptures and prints, she shows herself to be as talented at telling stories as at making art, imagining ambiguous metaphoric scenes where good and evil are not necessarily clear-cut opposites. (“Enantios” derives from the Greek word meaning opposite.) Going from one work to the next, from bronze sculptures to charcoal drawings to film, leaves one marveling at how so many different styles of work could have been created by one person.
In a film titled “Sleep,” a tree grows from a man’s head, and then sprouts heads at the ends of its branches. They soon fall off. An ax appears and off goes his head as well. A free-floating torso follows in the next scene, wrapped in string, then two torsos, and finally a woman, who discovers wings growing from her back. Like all Maher’s works, this film and the one titled “Godchildren of Enantios” are not only intriguing as disjointed narratives—the subjects usually finding themselves in some way closely related to nature—but as comments on our subconscious desires and instincts. They could be Jungian daydreams or nightmares. For instance, the graceful woman astride the strange, horned beast in the “Godchildren” film, reminds a viewer of the fairy tale character Rapunzel, with her long, flowing locks. But here her hair only trails over her shoulders, not down a tower wall, and the beast’s curly mane covers his eyes. Adding to the supernatural quality of the proceedings, eerie soundscapes by composer Trevor Knight accompany the films, which play on continuous loops so that visual and aural areas overlap.
Still from “Godchildren of Enantios,” by Alice Maher.
Maher’s sculptures appear as weighty as her drawings appear delicate. The sensual bronze “Swimmer” is simply long black hair, which looks like it had been caught in a tide. The aluminum-cast “Diver,” of a small person on the edge of a diving board, captures the subject’s hesitancy and fear. But then who are these other people: an unshaven man with an elaborate woman’s hairstyle? And the woman in “Caryatide,” with a lacy pattern all over her body? The only answer is that they live in Maher’s private universe, which she very generously shares with us, providing us with enough rich and fascinating imagery to tantalize for a very long time.
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Through March 16, David Nolan Gallery, 527 W. 29th St., 212-925-6190.
