Close Up

By Thomasine Bartlett, NEW ORLEANS ART REVIEW

Excerpt:

Always engaged with ecological issues, particularly the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest, little did Jacqueline Bishop think she would ever witness the destruction of New Orleans. However, staving in her lower garden district home through Katrina, she witnessed not only the havoc wrought by nature, but also the total breakdown of civil order that quickly followed, and the anarchistic rule of terror initiated by desperate and opportunistic citizens. These breakdowns of reason and order and the failure of man made systems to control nature or even temper its forces underscored, for Bishop, the dependence and fragility of the relationship between man and his environment. Acutely aware of the interconnections of all forms of life, even thinking of the landscape as a physical, living being, Bishop has long depicted this inseparability with paintings of intricate birds’ nests constructed of both human elements and elements of nature. Her fragile, intricate, painted nests cause the viewer to question the anthropocentric attitude common to technologically advanced cultures, and evoke a sense of shared vulnerability and a prayer for mutual respect.

Her nest paintings each depict a construction of disparate objects often disturbing, always beautiful. Small – sometimes even tiny – works, painted in hyper-realism, draw the viewer into a close, private inspection. Sensual and intimate, they frequently create feelings of illicit, transgressive pleasure as one absorbs the often shocking, sometimes even lewdly provocative displays of flowers, string, plastic, insect larvae, human hair and detritus. Each tiny nest its own self-sustaining eco-system — speaks of labor, shelter, birth, innocence, the interweaving of all life and of its eventual destruction. A New York reviewer recently compared her nests to barbed wire – a somewhat brutal interpretation. I think an interpretation, however, that evokes images of the post Katrina tangles of flood-washed debris: shards of Sevres porcelain, rotting meat, treasured baby pictures, unraveling carpet, a toothbrush, a tuxedo stud all snarled together in a downed chain-link fence.

The titles of her recent paintings, Flight from Reason – Unraveling – Sentient – Edge – Still Life (taken from the original meaning of the term, nature morte, or “dead nature”) refer to her post Katrina experience. In her own words, ‘There is a disconnect between the earth the landscape – and the human presence within it. The world is no longer ‘mother earth;’ you don’t rape your mother; we do rape the earth.”