Midcoast artist Annika Earley’s alter ego is a lot. Can you handle it?
'If You Want to be My Lover' at Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Falmouth asks viewers to accept the painter in her entirety.
PostedOctober 8
Jorge S. Arango
Annika Earley, “Pool,” 2024, gouache on paper, 22″ x 30″ Photos courtesy of the artist
The title of an exhibit at Moss Galleries in Falmouth – “Annika Earley: If You Want to be My Lover” (through Nov. 23) – uses a popular Spice Girls lyric to imply an ultimatum. It warns us up front that it will demand something of the wooer, whether an actual paramour or merely a curious art observer. What is being asked by this show, which teeters precariously on the tightwire between control and unreserved pandemonium, is that we must accept this artist uncompromisingly for the entirety of what she is.
IF YOU GO
WHAT: “Annika Earley: If You Want to Be My Lover”
WHERE: Elizabeth Moss Galleries, 251 Route 1, Falmouth
WHEN: Through Nov. 23
HOURS: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday
ADMISSION: Free
INFO: 207-781-2620, elizabethmossgalleries.com
It’s a big ask. It will be too much for some, while others (myself included) will appreciate the sheer brilliance and bravery of it. Earley summons a spirit (whose name we’re not going to print here) that is akin to the Spanish concept of “duende.” Goethe described duende as a “mysterious force that everyone feels, and no philosopher has explained.” It is our dark muse, the one that beckons us into the messy quagmire of primitive feelings and arises out of the blood and guts of being human. It’s the exact opposite of the ethereal muse, which strives towards lofty ideals, purity and transcendence.
Earley plunges us into the chthonic depths, presenting the spirit as a witchy, hairy, crook-nosed, taloned “fairy-godmother/demon/alter ego,” as she describes her in the show’s imaginative catalog, which includes letters to the spirit from different incarnations of the artist – namely, art student and mother.
In my conversation with Earley at the opening, she introduced me to the term “matrescence,” a portmanteau of “maternity” and “adolescence.” It was coined by anthropologist Dana Raphael to describe the social, hormonal, emotional and physical changes that accompany the transition into motherhood. To say these changes are unpredictable and complex hardly scratches the surface of their reality. Not surprisingly, the images in “If You Want to Be My Lover” take us on a rollercoaster ride of that mercurial landscape.
Most of the works are white gouache on black paper. This is intended “to create,” Earley explains in the catalog, “a subtle sense of discomfort, the uncanny, or the otherworldly.” But these are interspersed with sculptural objects that call to mind containers for magical potions or reliquaries for the many identities this journey incinerates. In the center of the gallery, we find a small installation comprising a desk – also all black and white – from which we can imagine the spirit generating her turbulent, at times unhinged oeuvre. It’s an interiorscape observed in meticulous detail, right down to her star-studded curl-toed shoes tucked underneath it.
Earley, who lives in Belfast, conjures her visual lexicon from her Swiss descent, incorporating the imagery of the culture’s folklore, craftwork (the paintings resemble the intricately cut paper works called scherenschnitte) and fraktur, an elaborate form of Germanic calligraphy.
The fraktur appears ironically, at times confrontationally, in German words and phrases at the bottoms and tops of some images. I don’t speak the language, but in my curiosity to uncover their meaning to further illuminate what was going on in Earley’s febrile mind, I looked some up. In a work called “Don’t You Wanna?,” the spirit lifts her petticoats and urinates on a cake plate, the fraktur for “love thing” appearing above and below the image. “Divination” is a picture anarchically littered with crystal balls, Tarot cards, candles, a witch’s broom, bath salts next to a checkered plunge pool, cake and candy and, entering the frame from one side, the spirit’s parted legs, her gnarly hand fondling her genitals. Above and below is the fraktur “Spiel mein spiel” (“play my game”).
It’s a startling image. Something is wildly out of control here. It’s a portrait of unrestrained desire, a depiction of licentious abandon spiked with an invocation to heightened – perhaps even dangerous – arousal intensified by the supernatural. The exacting precision of her representation (in this and all the paintings) creates an edgy conflict with the borderline madness of the subject matter. Earley is unafraid of luring us into the darker side of the emotions that lie beneath her controlled technique.
Annika Earley, “Pearl 1,” 2024, gouache on paper 5″ x 7″
Along one wall is a series of small numbered “Pearl” works. They display lush gardens from which curvaceous female bodies emerge – in “Pearl 1,” a shoulder, waist, buttocks and leg; in “Pearl 4” and “Pearl 11,” just a manicured hand. Strings of pearls intertwine with fingers or drape over a single breast or buttock.
In them, we can intuit Earley’s desire to reclaim her body, particularly its innate sensuality and eroticism, after nine months of essentially surrendering it to, and sharing it with, a fetus. “Draw Me Like One of Your French Girls” sharply confronts our idealized (and conditioned) notions of beauty by posing the grotesque spirit nude on a chaise like Manet’s “Olympia.” The title winks slyly toward Kate Winslet’s character in “Titanic,” adding a note of levity to some of Earley’s dark proceedings.
Art references like these (others include the snuffed candles of Renaissance vanitas paintings and the primordial plant life of Henri Rousseau) abound. Obsession, hysteria, desperation, grasping, sadistic delight, pornographic fantasies, decadence … it’s all here and it’s not all pretty. Or, perhaps even more slyly, it’s deceptively pretty.
But Earley has earned the right to plumb these depths. My earliest exposure to her work were delicate drawings of a torn net that she made years ago in response to a miscarriage. The rending in them was clearly psychological as well as physical. Her images here remind us of how difficult it is to conceive and bear a child, and on more levels than anyone except those who have experienced it can imagine.
Annika Earley, “Doily,” 2024, gouache on paper, 15″ x 20″
Yet amid her wrenching journey through matrescence are glimpses of less charged, even joyous, emotions. “Doily” portrays two hands holding up what looks like either the lacy object of the title (a symbol of feminine handiwork and domestic bliss) or an intricately tatted bib made for a newborn. In “Internal Family Systems,” a coven of topless beings cavort together over a bacchanalian feast. In all its bizarreness, the image exudes a sense of sisterhood, of shared experience that binds.
Earley’s current work is so personal that it is uncategorizable. And that is its own uncompromising reward.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com