Arts, January 1992

IDA APPLEBROOG

Why does it snow in SoHo year round? Within a four-block radius one can see a picturesque scene of showering flakes on any afternoon. Perhaps those floating white seeds are from lofty roof gardens. Do they come from blooming flowers in search of greener pastures or are they industrial waste from garment factories?

Ida Applebroog’s recent show, Safety Zone, is an eloquent commentary on the marginalization of difference. The figural placement and situational ambiguity of the works create a subversive dialogue of witty metaphors. Like the rooftop flower-seeds/styrofoam - reproductive/destructive - these pieces display a poignant duality.

Applebroog’s work is about dissonant juxtaposition. The figures project a tension, an edginess in their composition, and through their positioning, the visual effect is unsettling. It is apparent that Applebroog’s renditions of everyday life (however odd) are not the genre scenes of Dutch masters, but “under the covers” depictions of sexuality, loneliness, and alienation. Children are not representations of seen-and-not-heard innocence in pink pinafores and blue overalls, but powerful little monsters capable of silent mutilation. Women here are not high-fashioned proclaimers of feigned disdain for the égoiste! but peripheral figures looking from the inside out and speaking from the outside in.

In sacrament/flatulent (1991), a seemingly innocuous small child wrings the neck of a flailing turtle as an Avon door-to-door cross-bearer glides along the canvas. Two birds are perched on the painted barbed-wire in the panel above. Lohrengrin/bacitracin (1990- a knight of the Holy Grail meets an external antibiotic salve) is composed of eight joined canvases depicting two cartons of spilled ripe eggplants next to a woman whose figure is framed by a series of thrown knives. Below, a man opens a woman’s shirt. On the adjacent panels, the image of a man combing a woman’s hair is repeated four times in small light-boxes. These unchanging vignettes function as a bridge between the high art and the main canvas and the low art of the comical frieze frames. A departure from the usual wall-orientation of Applebroog’s canvases are the Marginalia pieces placed on the floor throughout the gallery. These propped paintings on struts are strategically mounted in areas where the viewer cannot help but be confronted with their frankness. The issue of play, with instruments or with one another/an other, is addressed in one group, but the line between pleasure and pain is blurred. The viewer awakes from the sleepy reverie only to turn around face to face with a child holding a gun and a woman crouched in isolation. The psychological and physical “displacement” of these paintings, coupled with Applebroog’s display of wit, provide a release from painterly tradition and a displacement of behavioral stereotypes through juxtapositions of surrealism and “realism.” Applebroog is not erecting constructions of moralism or guilt around the viewer, but allowing a place for the margin to flow into the text and creating visual dialogues incorporating difference.

-KATHLEEN FINLEY