May/June 2005

 

Robin Ward: “Otherkin at Lisa Dent Gallery

 

Horses, butterflies, hippos, macaques, sloths, elephants, and birds float through Robin Ward's recent series “Otherkin,” the title referring to people who believe their souls are part animal. Ward combines content-rich imagery with formal strategies (and the odd prop) to produce pencil and gouache drawings that vary among sketch, surreal narrative, fable, and psychological tableau.

Ward focuses on animals with rich symbolic histories. Horses (associated with strength, libido, and death) and butterflies (representative of womanhood, wandering spirits, and metamorphosis) predominate. She uses several techniques to emphasize the species' surreal and symbolic aura: rich, isolated detail; copious negative space; a flattened picture plane and a neutral gouache layer that makes the fine drawings pop out, heightening the visual and psychological conceit of the imagery.

The empty backgrounds in these quirky compositions often take on narrative roles—in Papersea it functions as the water in which the horses swim; in Frankenflutter and Aerodynamics of the Swarm , it represents the sky in which the monster and horse float. In other works that describe an animal from more than one vantage point, the negative space in the background seems less intentional, and the ragged edge of the paper is evocative of pages torn from a sketchbook. Are we meant to understand these in the same way? Perhaps a bit of editing would have made for a tighter show.

The best works were focused but formally and symbolically complex. In Butterfairy , and earthbound cluster of people is rendered in a monochromatic photorealist style, while the central female figure, painted in light tones and lacking contouring or facial features (an angel? The otherkin soul?), is being carried away by a swarm of butterflies, which are stylized and extremely graphic (romantically reduced to symbols?). This drawing is an apt synopsis of “Otherkin”: a cross-section of reality represented, reduced, and suspended.

—Laura Richard Janku