Stephanie “Portico” Bowman Review

I look at art or I make art to find clues that tell me everything is going to be OK, and I mean everything. Not only do I want my life to be polished, perfect and whole, but I want everyone else to enjoy the same thing. I also look at art because I want to know that the planet will be saved from the doomsday forecast of impending catastrophe and in particular the part of the globe I’m living on, and most specifically the dwelling I inhabit. Jennifer Vanderpool’s landscape interventions do all that and more. Intervention connotes a certain urgency, disaster abated, harmony restored. As I imagine Vanderpool flying through space, in a plane, from her Los Angeles home to land in Tulsa as the featured artist and recipient of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts at the Living Arts of Tulsa’s “Living with Art in the Garden Tour 06” to create “Sugary Sweet” I get the impression from seeing the results of her practice in action that she wasted no time ladling out generous portions of her cure for the maladies of our age. It is not that the garden in Tulsa required any intervention. In fact the opposite is true and it’s obvious that Vanderpool took numerous visual cues from the beauty she was immersed in, however her interventions are not about restoring landscape so much as they are about bridging the gap between the imaginary and the real, and in so doing she meets my criteria as an artist who has the first aid information I need.

Robert C. Morgan says that her “candy coated phosphorescent vibrations of synthetic form are not so much about the dichotomy between nature and culture as they are a resistance to that dichotomy” and I would add that this dichotomy is not the problem. Instead the modern malady has become the belief that the magical no longer conspires to give our daily life any value. What Vanderpool offers me with her overloaded intensity of neon particles of acrylic paint, or miniature neon flowers, carpet underlay and sand is the view into the middle space and how the subconscious storehouse of my mind must store impressions that then become the materials I use to provide the magical expectation of the new place I might visit or move to in my never ending quest to find home. How she does this is with layers of excavated meaning collected into mountains of unusual materials in combinations that seem like they could exist only in an imagination, but they are in fact real and go on to provide the foundation for the crown jewels in her creations. These “jewels,” Jell-o molds now filled with resin, are the mandalas of Carl Jung’s psychological system where the open void, or they “eye” comes to be both the eye of the artist and the cosmos. The union of the two is united where imagination and reality interpenetrate and commingle. This center becomes the place that Jung would suggest is “the path to the center and to individuation” while the firm, confident molds perch like pert upturned nipples willing to suckle and nurture not only the newborn but the lover as well with life and hope. The colors, contours and confident forms focus our gaze directly into the center of the mandala and insistently shrug off any suggestions of despair about the future because the forms are so perfect.

Stephanie “Portico” Bowman
Pittsburg, Kansas 2006