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Molly Briggs at Zg
Art in America, Sept, 2007 by Victor M. Cassidy
Landscape is Molly Briggs's point of departure for explorations of paint, color and composition. Her images of tree silhouettes in empty landscapes recall photography and film as they suggest memory and dream. Briggs starts with a wood panel, which she covers with linen or canvas. She glues paper vellum on top and paints it with silvery tempera to create a matte gray surface with a sparkle like a movie screen. Working in tempera, acrylic and Flashe, Briggs then paints the tree silhouettes in roughly overlapping layers of blue-silver, then pale blue and red. She renders each tree with great exactitude, giving it independent life. We see the red first in a finished painting because it's the bright top layer, but the paler layers beneath echo and balance it as they give the scene depth.
For two years, the artist photographed trees along North Avenue, a major Chicago artery that starts at Lake Michigan and proceeds nine miles west to the city border. Next, she created a 2-by30-foot eight-panel work, Fabula North Avenue, by projecting photo images of single trees from each city block in geographic order onto a background and painting them. She showed this work in a university gallery late in 2006. For the show at Zg she divided up the panels (keeping two as diptychs), and added four new paintings.
Some of Briggs's trees have leaves, some don't. Occasional details include birds' nests, a plastic bag caught in branches, a tiny fence, shrubs and weeds. Isolated from their city surroundings and presented against a pale background, the trees seem to exist in empty, parklike spaces. They recall Harry Callahan's photographs of Chicago trees in snow, which he took on North Avenue near Lake Michigan.
Fabula North Avenue #3 shows three dense, leafy trees at left and center with their crowns merged, along with a dead or dying one at right whose sketchy roots and branches bespeak its lack of vitality. These trees are painted red but behind them are pale blue, almost ghostly ones, which draw our eye into the painting and balance it three-dimensionally. Briggs has been showing solo in Chicago since 1999, and this body of work is her most complex and rewarding to date.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
