Fauerso featured at artist talk

On Feb. 24 the art department sponsored a talk featuring Joey Fauerso, known for her award-winning work exploring the dynamic intersection between seemingly disparate themes — the male nude in frothy Rococo landscapes, or painting joined with animation to a custom-made soundtrack of clapping hands and clanking horns.

A painter by training, Fauerso told her audience that she has always had a lingering fascination with layered elements that may not quite go together, perhaps stemming from a childhood spent at a meditation colony in rural Iowa. At times her family and her parents’ friends, most of them transplants to the state drawn to the community’s emphasis on Eastern philosophies, seemed at odds with the surrounding area, which was rural and decidedly conservative.

“It was a transcendental, alternative community, but growing up in Iowa it had a surreal quality because it contrasted so much with the rural Midwest,” Fauerso said. “We would travel to other centers around the world. In India I saw such an emphasis on ritual, transient splendor, garlands of flowers, Hindu deities, rebirth — a sort of perishable opulence.”

This delicate balance appears again and again in Fauerso’s work. One recurring subject in particular comes to mind: the male nude painted onto found landscapes discovered at garage sales and old wallpaper, arms outstretched, mouth wide open, crouched, dancing, but often contrasted with the opulent patterns of the nature in which he is situated.

Fauerso acknowledges that her work does gravitate towards the male nude as a subject, often placed to mimic classical pieces occupying museums that feature nude women frolicking with cupids and swings or languishing in the lush undergrowth.

“In some ways, it just happened. As an undergrad I mostly painted friends, who mostly happened to be men,” she said. “Post-modern art is all about different perspectives, but I still think there’s a huge historical backlog in how the female vs. the male body is portrayed. It comes down to a simple desire to see more of a range and complexity. It’s an interesting subject to me, one which is easy to make big and theatrical.”

Fauerso describes a turning point in her work as the moment when she painted her brother onto an old mural she found at a hotel.

“The disjunction between his figure and the idyllic rural landscape as metaphor for how we position ourselves in space, how we perceive our surroundings, really pushed me in a new direction,” Fauerso said during her lecture.

Art is by no means a static process, and Fauerso’s work continues to evolve. Her recent foray into animation has produced fascinating results. One piece she presented was composed of over 300 paintings done of a friend making different facial expressions, then played in sequence. The work is inspired by a story from the Bhagavid Gita in which the child god Krishna opens his mouth for his human foster mother, who sees the entirety of the universe laid out before her. In Fauerso’s animation, her friend opens his mouth, and we find the starry heavens where his tonsils should be.

Another animation shows a flock of painted birds — really a few birds superimposed over and over again using software — undulating in and out of the screen, while another portrays a painted man and tree continually fading in and out of existence to the melancholy strains of “Death of an Outlaw” from Aaron Copland’s ballet, “Billy the Kid.”

Animation has once again pushed Fauerso’s work toward the juxtaposition between two seemingly mismatched phenomena, in this case the age-old tradition of painting and newer innovations in software technology. The two are literally layered on top of each other in pieces that portray live-action models frolicking against found landscapes, with painted birds darting across the horizon.

However daring and new the medium, Fauerso’s work remains at home in the layering of contrasting elements; unexpected, colorful, patterned and very much alive.