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 'Immersions' Is An Artful Commentary On The Imagination And Ecology Of The Sea. By Margaret Regan DOWN AT ROCKY Point, the tide pools glow silver in the beam of a flashlight. Everything is wet and shiny: the water puddled in the hollows of the porous rocks, the dark sand, the tiny shapes of the sea creatures clinging to every surface. And everywhere you step, the water comes seeping out of the saturated beach, making new patterns around your foot. It's not much of a stretch to think of converting these visual delicacies into art, and sure enough the wiggly outlines of the anemone, the free-form lines of the seaweed and the curves of the rock turn up time and again in the paintings of Tucsonan David Andres.
But there are marked differences. Andres conjures up the world under the sea in his imagination; interestingly, his visions of the deep translate into paintings that stay deliberately flat and on the surface. Simmons-Myers photographs water from above, allowing depth and perspective into her works. And where Andres splashes his abstracted sea shapes with colors as luminous as those glowing inside a jellyfish--and sprinkles them with the silvery glitter of a Rocky Point night--Simmons-Myers stays with stark black and white. The work she's exhibiting in this show searches out water wherever she can find it in the Southwest. It's at Puerto Peñasco, to be sure, where she shoots shrouded human figures curled up like mollusks dug in near the foam or like snails burrowed into a sand pit. But unlike Andres, Simmons-Myers, the head of the photography department at Pima College, goes deep inland, too, to find her watery images: to the big, fake lake in the desert, Lake Powell; to muddy desert rivers; and natural springs such as Agua Caliente park in Tucson.
All 35 pictures that Simmons-Myers contributed are from her continuing Shrouded series. Her working method for this variation on the age-old figure-in-the-landscape genre is unusual. She wraps a naked human in cloth and then poses the draped model somewhere in the outdoors. In an earlier show, also at Dinnerware, the humans were all bound females and there were undertones not only of censorship but of violence and torture.
Humorous as it can be, this work of beautiful lights and darks has a serious side. Sometimes there's a suggestion of abandonment, even death. In "Shrouded: Agua Caliente," the wrapped figure suggests a corpse tossed into a hidden mud flat. And there are environmental undertones to the work of both the painter and the photographer, quite apart from both desert artists' obvious inclusion of water in every work.
Andres' paintings honor nature through a purely sensual homage
to the sea, devoid of any human despoiling. Simmons-Myers makes
a more pointed commentary about our relationship to the earth.
Her figures are an intrinsic part of the landscape, but they never
dominate it. Wrapped in her patterned cloths, the people take
on the protective coloration of nature. They blend in with the
seaside rocks, with the reeds along a river, the bark of a tree,
becoming just another element in an ecology with multiple players.
David Andres/Ann Simmons-Myers: Immersions continues through Sunday, August 9, at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. The artists will give a free gallery talk at noon on Wednesday, June 17. The museum's summer hours are 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, noon to 4 p.m. Sundays, closed Saturdays. For more information, call 621-7567.
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Andres' lovely acrylic paintings inspired by the life forms at
the edge of the sea and down in the deep are in a big new show
at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Immersions
actually is a dialogue between Andres and Tucson photographer
Ann Simmons-Myers. Both of them work the deliciously organic shapes
of the sea, the regular patterns of sand, the irregular outlines
of the strange creatures, the luminous quality of water. The show
has been hung to take advantage of the compositional correspondences
between the two. The twin pulsating shapes of Simmons-Myers' "Shrouded:
Sandsnail" and Andres' "Anemone," for instance,
are a joy to see.
Exhibition notes explain that Andres and Simmons-Myers have been
friends for 20 years, and have often vacationed along the waters
of Mexico with their families. Andres has delved into sea themes
for ages, sometimes exhibiting large paintings around town, other
times showing jewel-like monoprints. Simmons-Myers doesn't limit
herself to water--her last Dinnerware show was a series of portraits
of a woman near death--but she photographs it often enough that
she and Andres decided to pair their water work for the Immersions
show. (The exhibition is the latest in a long line of UAMA shows
honoring UA arts grads: Andres got his master's in 1979, and Simmons-Myers
hers in 1981.)
This Shrouded suite is much more playful. In "Shrouded:
Sea Lions," a pair of young models cavort on the sand, wrapped
in glittery dark cloth, aping the movements of the sea mammals.
"Shrouded: Mollusk" clothes another crouched figure
on the beach in a wonderfully patterned cloth (the photographer
apparently owns dozens); it's been gathered around the model's
feet to look like fins. "Shrouded: Lake Powell" offers
a frankly fake pair of sea lions, draped humans, sunning themselves
on the fake beach of the fake lake. Other wrapped models become
cocoons and snakes and even a grazing bison.
