Two against nature

Abby Shahn and Jim Flahaven “New at Aucocisco

By Jenna Russell

Abby Shahn and Jim Flahaven “New and Vintage Works” shows at Aucocisco Gallery through December 31. (207)874-2060.

“PROMETHEUS,” by Abby Shahn, egg tempera/paper.

Don’t look for tidings of comfort and joy at Aucocisco this holiday season. The art on the walls is bright enough — red and orange flames, flying fish — but the subject matter is turbulent, mired in the violence of men, against their own brothers and against the natural world.

Artists Abby Shahn and Jim Flahaven are well matched in the current show at the gallery. Both are moved by real events and real injustice, and both deal with the things that disturb them in collage-style works that utilize a variety of mediums and materials. Shahn has lived in rural Maine for decades, creating vibrant, lively, color-driven paintings, collage and ceramics with subtle but substantial subtexts. Flahaven is a newcomer to Maine, from rural Pennsylvania. He favors environmental statements, made from assembled objects, broken glass, wire, and branches among them. His politics transmit a little more loudly than Shahn’s.

Of the two artists, it’s Shahn’s side of the room that feels freer, more intuitive. Line is a natural, living force in large, abstracted geometrics like “Prometheus,” a two-year-old egg tempera. It’s a loud and crashing vision, a sea of red and orange fire cut by bold black and white lines, with what looks like birds’ heads diving into the chaos. Flames dominate the earlier “Oil Fire” (1990) as well; divided into four segments, the painting writhes with fiery energy. Fumes rise off a molten valley while knifelike black fingers stretch skyward. The heart of the picture is a deep black socket, but the reds and yellows fight hard, kicking and screaming against every inch of darkness. Line seems something lashed directly onto paper by the most volatile part of the psyche. It’s internally driven, with the artist’s hand as mere messenger.

Shahn’s artistic roots are right here in the Aucocisco show, which functions as a kind of mini-retrospective. Two pieces from the 1970s, “Bog” and “Little Thunderstorm,” are quieter, muted squares of color pieced together like puzzles and raised on box-shaped frames. They resemble brick walls, with their chalky, scratched surfaces, though the soft, checkered colors look like patchwork quilts, and their titles reference the light and color of nature. The quilt effect recurs in the 1980s, in collages like “Gum Magazine I” and “II.” Shahn includes literal references here to world unrest and warfare, newspaper photographs of gunmen opposite pictures of college basketball players. The connection between the two things — their likeness, or difference? — is unclear. By all rights the collage should resemble a B- project for a high school current events class; instead Shahn achieves a softly fractured resonance.

Like Shahn, Flahaven has moved away from the explicitly literal in his recent work. The issues “don’t scream like they used to,” he reflects in an artist’s statement. Still, the issues live close to the surface, as in “The Source,” where metal fish strung with weights dangle from the mouths of glass Coke bottles. Man versus nature is the built-in conflict, and it’s even more pronounced in “Between Here and There.” A large, painted fish hangs like a trophy on a plaque, with a crown made from strips of blue Pennsylvania license plates. It’s an arresting juxtaposition, the man-made world intruding on the natural, but the comment is complex because Flahaven’s fish is sanitized and emblematic, an idealized symbol, not a real, wild creature. The contrast is that of the junk car in the once-pure stream, but it’s the fisherman’s perspective, not a fish-eye view.

“TORNADO WEATHER,” by Jim Flahaven, oil/copper panel.

These are indelicate sculptures, sometimes busy, sometimes clunky, though their dialogue is often eloquent. Nature itself becomes mechanical in “Wishful Thinking,” where a clumsy wooden bird is wired to a branch. The artist’s pushing is less obtrusive in “Harvests,” an asymmetrical triptych that makes an icon of a real metal orb, maybe a buoy, with flaking orange paint, and pairs it with a painting of a chem-green sky and white industrial tanks. It’s a weighty, engaging piece, strangely beautiful, with room for the viewer to deduce the missing links.

That’s the kind of beauty in Shahn’s “nature” paintings, elusive and obscure. Her tan, brown, and silver “Flying Fish” is the visual imprint of sensation — the wind blowing, the brushing past of a horse tail. There’s nothing in it that much resembles a fish, but there’s something like its shadow, or the damp place where it lay. Whatever it is, it feels closer to real fish than Flahaven’s metal cutouts. Shahn also has a lively sense of humor, seen in her forest contour “Woods Creatures,” with its cartoon eyes peering out between trees. There’s playfulness in Flahaven’s oeuvre, too, in his kitschy “Beach Bird” and “City Bird” made of cut-up vintage postcards, but it’s on a level that ensures it’s understood. Shahn is less concerned that her every point is taken, and like the lover who plays hard to get, her self-containment draws us like a magnet.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.