NYAB Event - JoAnne McFarland "Acid Rain"

JoAnne McFarland "Acid Rain"

A.I.R. Gallery

This event has ended.

In her exhibition of oil paintings and poems, Acid Rain, JoAnne McFarland explores the steady erosion of empathy in the social
contract. By pairing vivid, sensuous paintings of fruits and vegetables with captions that evoke images of personal and/or global aggression, the artist illustrates the escalating tension between the fed and the unfed, the sheltered and the vulnerable. This is the world in which beet and beat, chard and shard create divergent realities.

The exhibition incorporates two sets of poems—Rules and Rice—from McFarland’s latest poetry collection. The poems, from the vantage points of two archetypes of despair, domestic abuse (Rules) and starvation (Rice), rain down sheets of shoji paper. Their toxicity serves as a counterpoint to the classicism on view in the still lives.

Geoffrey Jacques, author of A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African–American Imaginary, says of these poems: “In Acid Rain, JoAnne McFarland writes with a sure hand, with a musical sense of the poetic line that never errs. These verses carry a voice that muses over an eroticism that is at once familiar and estranged. “Your tongue carves my future,” the voice says, and we hear and feel the anxieties, and the terrors, of what often passes for sexual love.”

Three large scale paintings anchor the exhibition: two of the polluted waterway the Gowanus Canal located near the artist’s studio, and one that is a takeoff on Manet’s Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe in which the artist wears a white gown and crouches in a clearing. The painting is entitled Après le Déjeuner.

An audio version of McFarland reading Acid Rain, with music composed by William Murray, is also available.

McFarland has art works in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the Department of State among others. She has published widely in national and international literary journals. This is her third solo exhibition in A.I.R.’s Gallery I.