Art in America
September 1999
Jan Cicero Gallery
Emmi Whitehorse
by Claire Wolf Krantz
In her mixed-medium works on paper,
Emmi Whitehorse depicts an atmosphere -- earth and sky alive with mysterious
markings that powerfully evokes the landscape of her native Southwest. To
create a low panorama of scrub and desert, Whitehorse rubs layers of colored
pigment into a base of acrylic medium on heavy printing paper enlivening her
surfaces with slight variations in density of pigment and hue. With vigorous
strokes of graphite and other drawing materials, she imbues the scene with a
sense of energy or life force. Some of the marks look like hermetic codes.
The colors
are of the earth, night skies or terra-cotta pots. They recall Navajo rugs, which
are similarly abstract representations of the land and human activity on it.
Some of Whitehorse's sketchy forms, such as patterns of zigzags and concentric
half-circles, upright lines and clusters of circles, could indicate the shape
of mountains, livestock brands, or plants and trees. Spiraling and meandering
lines seem like traces of movement: the imagined pathway of a jumping rabbit,
the track of a line of ants or of a scurrying rodent.
While Whitehorse"s markmaking is similar in all her paintings, each work shows subtle differences. Mood, time of day and season are conveyed by the palette. On the icy blues of Water Lane, (1996), markings resemble aquatic plants; even the leafy forms seem droopy and soaked. In contrast, Cloud Chamber's tonal range of cadmium reds, oranges, yellows and crimsons glows with heat and also recalls light on the desert floor when the sun peeks from behind a cloud. Here, a tipped-up picture plane eliminates both horizon line and sky, thus intensifying the sensation of warmth arising from dry, baking earth. Tight clusters of dots and circles sugges dessicated plants and may refer to Whitehorse's early memories of her grandmother, a weaver who used dried plants for her dyes.
It is
tempting to read Whitehorse's mark-making as a discursive language similar to
that in prehistoric petroglyphs or the sand paintings of her native Navajo
culture. However, they are not specific signs or literal representations.
Rather, her abstract means elicit the feelings connected to memories of
particular places or events, creating a sense of quiet mystery.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images