Art in America
January 2000
Wood Street Gallery

Joyce Neimanas
Dog Show
By Claire Wolf Krantz

 

Dog Show, Joyce Neimanas's exhibition of digitally produced Iris prints and three-dimensional collages, was a humorous commentary on how we have reshaped the behavior of "man's best friend" (and perhaps the wildness within us). For this body of work, she digitally scanned photos of her own dog's chewed and often eviscerated toys -- playthings which replace the real animals her dog would have hunted in the wild in order to collage them with artifacts from different cultures.

For China Cat she put an image of her pet's toy cat in a picture of a room scanned from a Chinese brothel album. The photographic image of the furry toy contrasts with the rigid stylization of the linear Chinese Court Style drawing. In Mosaic Dog, using a photograph of a Roman mosaic floor as a background, Neimanas embedded a furry ruglike form into the shape of a Roman guard dog. As in China Cat, Neimanas contrasts flat, ordered geometry with the texture of fur, and images from historical sources with a contemporary photograph.

In Medieval Walk, the artist turns to an illuminated medieval German manuscript. An image of a man riding a donkey represents an animal in the service of man, while the contemporary canine images suggest that people have now become the servants of their pets. Recontextualized, a screaming pair of figures from the manuscript appear to be arguing about who will walk the dog. Other images scavenged from popular culture, such as coloring books and commercial catalogues, were reminiscent of Neimanas's earlier collages of vernacular images. While owing something to the Chicago Imagists, those collages explored socially constructed issues of gender.

The elements in her recent digital prints are so skillfully woven together that sometimes it's difficult to distinguish the photographed imagery from the art-historical and other borrowings. This ambiguity strengthens the works because it allows for mystery and multiple interpretations. In addition to being immediately seductive, Neimanas's dense, beautiful works are catalysts for prolonged thought.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.