10 • ISSUE October 2011
Volume 18, No. 2
‘HIDDEN WORLDS’
LAUGHLIN’S PAINTINGS REVEAL INNER WORLD OF INTERIORS TO VIEW PAGE LAUGHLIN’S work is to enter a world of illusion. On the surface, her lush, visually sumptuous paintings are decorative and colorful. But what lies below the surface is one key to discovering the illusions on offer. Instead of the usual canvas or panel, Laughlin’s rich oil rests uneasily on a thin surface of Mylar, a fragile plastic most usually found in food packaging. “The vast majority of my work has been on canvas and on panels,” Laughlin said, in an email interview. “I was searching for a presentation for my paintings that would bring a ‘light-ness’ that serves as a counterpoint to the lush surface, and as a foil to the illusion of depth in the paintings. As a painter, I am always interested in creating illusions and breaking them, as well.” “Hidden Worlds; Paintings by Page Laughlin,” a 15piece exhibition, is on display at The Dishman Art Museum at Lamar University through Oct. 21. The paintings are inspired by photos of interiors culled from popular homes magazines. Jessica Dandona, director of the Dishman, worked at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University where Laughlin teaches. “I have always been very drawn to her work, both in terms of their beauty and in terms of the intellectual questions they pose,” Dandona said. “Page starts with the glossy high-end home magazines that we like to peruse over coffee on the weekends. She starts with something like “Architectural Digest” and she re-interprets the scenes she finds there.” Dandona said Laughlin works on a couple of different levels. “On one hand she creates this very finely crafted, hand-made work that is in and of itself a luxury product, like the products that are in these magazines,” she said. “But she then subverts that in a couple of interesting ways. First of all, she chooses to do oil painting on Mylar, a kind of plastic which is inherently fragile and is also relatively inexpensive. It’s something that we associate with commercial products and industrialization. So already you can see her getting away from this idea of a precious, rare object and playing with that idea. “The Mylar makes the work seem less substantial. So you have these layers and layers and layers of paint accumulated over a year or more — so much time and effort has gone into this work — and yet it is on this very impermanent material that can be easily creased. It’s fragile.” Dandona said her interpretation of Laughlin’s work is to think of these interiors as not an actual inside, as an expression of what the people who actually live in them are truly like, but, in a way, as a kind of elaborate façade — a reversal of inside and outside. “She underscores the artificiality of these created spaces through the pictorial choices that she makes,” Dandona said. “The other thing that she does is to focus in on the telling detail of the scene. Often, these will be decorative details that employ the bodies of people of color in a decorative way. I know that sounds mysterious, but what I mean by that is that she makes us aware of the strangeness of choice to have a candlestick in the
Story by Andy Coughlan
PARROTS AND PLATES by Page Laughlin shape of a black woman’s body, and thus prompts us to consider how objects construct meaning all around us. “Her challenge to the viewer, then, is to consider how the choices we make about our own visual environment might sometimes produce meanings that, upon reflection, are problematic.” Laughlin sends messages about how our environment sends messages about who we are and what we believe. Some of those messages can be destructive, Dandona said. “It’s not about any particular race, it’s about why we would consider it quaint to turn another person’s body into wallpaper as a sign of refinement. In fact, it’s asserting a position of power in relationship to that body. You are suggesting that you can use it for your own pleasure, just as we might use an actual body.” Even though Laughlin’s work gives the appearance of thickness, there are sometimes small areas of the
Mylar that are left unpainted so viewers can actually see through to the wall behind. “I love that because it creates that sense of insubstantiality, that these are images, that they are illusion — it takes their sense of presence and solidity and permanence away,” Dandona said. “It says these are illusions that we create and throw up to evoke an aura of refinement. But they are impermanent, like all things.” Mylar is non-absorbent so it may take a year for the oil paint to dry. Laughlin had to make the decision on which ones to send to the Dishman based on whether they were dry or not, Dandona said. Laughlin’s work is lush and richly detailed. “I have always been attracted to seductive paintings,” she said. “I love the process of painting and
See HIDDEN on page 14
