Vaughn Garland: Surface, Identity, Time
Abingdon, Virginia


On the surface, Vaughn Garland’s work, on view at the William King Regional Art Center [William King Regional Arts Center, June 27 – September 7, 2008], seems to revisit formalist painting concerns. With time, however, the focal point shifts away from formal concerns to the obliquely intimate, biographical, and emotional.

The show consists of fifteen paintings from 2003 through 2007, as well as eleven drawings on paper. The paintings vary from a diminutive 12” x 12” to a maximum of 8’ x 7’. The most recent work settles on a happy medium of 5’ square. Their materials-focused, nonrepresentational qualities, combined with an utter lack of irony, and titles such as Psyche and the Soul [2007] project a universal angst and heroism reminiscent of abstract expressionism. But what is really surprising is how these grand heroics shift unexpectedly into something poignantly interior and domestic.

Garland grew up in Southwest Virginia, and while biographical details are not always important to understanding an artist’s work, it seems absolutely central to this body of work. That the most important and affecting aspect of the work – the private, biographical content – is veiled behind more evident formal surface treatment seems in keeping with a region that values privacy, distrusts authority, and loathes to be easily pinned down.

The largest paintings have an architectural feel, like slabs of decaying buildings cut out and hung on gallery walls. They might be painterly variations on Gordon Matta-Clark’s hulking chunks of excised building parts; but where Matta-Clark evokes derelict urban spaces, Garland calls to mind rural Appalachian homesteads. One painting, with yellowy-white layers incised with parallel lines, resembles painted floorboards. Another could be a battered plaster wall with exposed joist holes and peeling paint. A third resembles a huge whitewashed window with airy blue sky filtering in from behind. The accompanying tenderness of such allusions gives the work a quiet, yearning beauty.   

But these are not pretty paintings. Some are almost willfully ugly. It is important, too, that there is nearly no trace whatsoever of green; absent are the organic, pastoral colors of the natural world that most city-dwellers conflate with rural life. Instead, the dominant colors are inorganic and human-mitigated: dense coal-black, rusty iron oxide, gaseous sky-blue, an off-white reminiscent of plaster or painted wood, and a sweat-, urine-, or lard-soaked yellow.

The peeling paint, rotting greasy blobs, grimy yellowed stains, and blackened crusty patches create a sense decrepitude, decay and nostalgia. It also conveys moral undertones – a sort of American-Appalachian vanitas – counseling against vanity, waste, lack of gratitude, or forgetfulness of the non-material, spiritual side of life.

The recent work suggests new directions. Where earlier paintings evoke the plastered over secret life of the private domain, the newer work feels less reclusive and more epic. The 2007 paintings are dominated by a rusty iron color evocative of derelict industrial machinery and dirt. But two 2007 paintings go further: Iron Oxide on Unbleached White: The Stain of this War [2007] and Celebes County Wildfire [2007] are glossy, open and spacious rather than chalky, dense, greasy or yellowed. Both feel less ambivalent about beauty. Iron Oxide on Unbleached White is most unlike the rest. It’s iron-dirt color has turned a blood red and the brushy atmospherics carry a Turneresque romanticism. Even the title, with its nod to the ongoing Iraq war, suggests a turning away from a cloistered inner life and an engagement with the broader world of historical import.

The drawings have a hard time holding their presence alongside the larger, more muscular paintings. Excepting a couple of stand-outs, their extreme reductive quality and comparative insubstantiality come across as incomplete statements.

—Heather Harvey