Review by Christina Hill

Andrea Eis and Lynn Galbreath
At The Gallery, Marygrove College,
September 14-October 12, 2008

If the recent work of photographer, Andrea Eis, and painter, Lynn Galbreath, exhibits a common attitude it is detachment: Backs are resolutely turned, heads cropped out, disconcerting voids inserted, texts chopped, faces blurred, cryptic comments and glances unexplained. With Galbreath there is absence of language, with Eis a deluge of language – mostly ancient Greek. But mute or loquacious, the work plugs in to the contemporary experience of inundation by streams of visuals. The viewer is in deep, yet still able to catch glimpses of images and snippets of sound.

“I like the idea that you can’t get the whole story,” says Eis of her digitally layered photographs, while Galbreath, listing confusion as one of her goals, reserves the right to rearrange at any time her modular painted panels into different (equally disconcerting) narratives. If you expect meaning tied up as a gift, get over it. Postmodern attitudes –such as incoherence, enigma, appropriation and fragmentation – permeate the artworld’s zeitgeist. While both artists, colleagues at Oakland University, intend for their work to explore the human condition, especially the position of women, the styles they’ve chosen mimic more dispassionate forms of communication, so it takes work (which will be rewarded) to extract meaningful messages.

Certainly the women differ. Eis contentedly mines an interest in the Classics, while Galbreath prefers charging into new territory. For Eis the photographic medium is merely a tool to use in what she considers “the act of translating,” or reinterpreting icons of ancient history; they fascinate her because they’ve transcended time and place. Galbreath lives and (literally) breathes paint application, calling herself “an advocate of medium.” She has created portraits of her students and mixed them with abstract imagery and interpretations of Old Masters. Newly excited about using oil paint and glazes, her love of painting and her subject matter are impossibly intertwined. The artists have in common thinking big: some of Eis’s archival ink-jet prints are 4 x 6 feet, while Galbreath has connected panels to reach 50 feet in length.

It was one-hundred year old books in ancient Greek, discovered in an Athens library, that inspired Eis’s sabbatical work. Her “Marginalia” pieces highlight penciled notes made in the books’ margins. Eis thoughtfully layers portions of these pages, with their English comments – such as “where do the depths come in?” and “yearn after” – over or under photos of ancient Greek sculpture to create her own poetic genre. Some photos she’s printed on sheer fabric. The heightened texture of the paper when superimposed against the smooth marble creates painterly effects; the velvety-black, visually-arresting Greek letters animate the surfaces. The compositions can be frenetic with visual effects. In “Questioning the Classics,” Eis zooms in on parts of imperfect sculptures, close up on missing noses, gouges and blemishes, and thereby frustrates our desire to experience traditional beauty. Hers is a new translation.

Eis places us somewhere between a durably material yesterday and a digitally immaterial present; texts crawl, reading as temporal. While Eis has warmed the tones in some pieces, because the ancient language doesn’t communicate to most of us, they retain a Marshall McLuhan cool. “When you are on the phone or the air, you have no body,” he said. Like images on iPhones and texts on Blackberrys, Eis’ creations appear fleeting. But her conundrums linger: Greek text is placed over the muscular bicep of a god, as is connected English comment: “often used of getting what one wants,” the title of the piece. Eis submits it’s an archaic phrase, difficult to translate. And she leaves it at that for us to ponder over.

Lynn Galbreath creates narrative portraiture using modular components ranging in number. “I can’t keep them keep from growing,” she says. The multiples reference Nam June Paik’s video installations (they don’t blink on and off, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they did). Her subjects are caught off-guard, in mid-sentence and mid-task, wearing inscrutable facial expressions – total blurriness at times – and body postures suggesting imminent movements. Combined at Galbreath’s will, these components seem like stacks of out-of-order film stills or randomized computer slide shows. They are contemporary anti-narratives. Like Jean Luc Godard in his postmodern films, Galbreath sporadically adds elements of eye-catching consumer design: specifically Pop target shapes which connect the characters but also radiate their psychological energy out into the ether.

Galbreath’s monumental “Don’t I Care” always includes three separate panels for the words of its title, but otherwise its components are changeable in order and number. “Don’t” incorporates scenes from iconic versions of “Rape of the Sabine Women,” including moving details of hands laid imploringly on the foreheads of young female victims to provide life. Another panel portrays the hands of a busy modern woman clutching her purse and cell phone. Hair styles also figure prominently, from an elderly man in a powdered wig, to a young woman’s messy braid, to the bowl-cut of a young boy, to a replica of the slick black hair of Goya’s famous “3rd of May” figure. We see only the backs of many of them. A scene from early modernism also barges in – a group of distorted heads (one pig-like) with Edvard Munch-flavored alienation. Galbreath’s muscular brushwork with its vibrant baroque energy comes close to unifying this disparate subject matter, but in the end, the title, with its odd inversion of words, sums it up: What exactly? You decide.

The exhibition has an abundance of ambiguity and also irony: Carefully thought-through compositional elements appear random; warm, appealing colors, meant to convey human emotion and timeless life lessons do that, but also function as more of the cool, unemotional (over)flow of contemporary visual information. Visitors foreheads furrow. The ironies, though, are what give Eis’s and Galbreath’s artwork, particularly when shown together, greater strength and more impact. The ambiguities keep you off balance and interested.