Safety Couture

In Elizabeth Jameson's charcoal and pastel drawings, anonymous figures are variously masked, hooded, helmeted, and headless; outfitted with enormous black gloves, clunky black shoes, and lopsided night-vision goggles; and bundled in dresses festooned with pillows, heavy sacks, and miniature staircases. Sometimes Jameson's outfits stand up by themselves, with no one inside, as if clothing has become so completely associated with personal identity that the wearer has disappeared in a poof of irrelevance.
      A primary subject of the drawings is fear. "Fear of society," says Jameson, "fear of the mind, of everything."

Fur Pillow Insulation Dress

      The different types of threats that face Jameson's figures, physical and psychological, flow into each other in a seamless atmosphere of dread. Clothing that protects from physical dangers--firemen's equipment, chemical suits, and the like--is also marshaled against social anxiety. The metaphor of safety garment as psychological bulwark takes wittily literal form in "Fur Pillow Insulation Dress." This drawing shows an outfit that both protects the wearer from sharp corners and provides an absurdly luxurious buffer between the eyes of the world and the fragile identity we imagine is cowering inside.
      Jameson draws from her imagination. She works in an artistic tradition--traceable back to Marcel Duchamp--that values concepts over technique. Thus one of the attractions of charcoal. "With the charcoal there's less control," she explains, and so less expectation of virtuosity. She also prizes the random elements that charcoal introduces. "I love the smeariness and the blackness on white paper. The simplicity of it. I don't like paint, with all those color choices, and too much technique!"
      Though technique per se may not be important, Jameson is after a certain expressiveness of gesture. This is something she shares with the Japanese arts of calligraphy and sumi-e (black ink painting), cited as important influences. Japanese aesthetics also impart to her work an elegant spareness of composition. Jameson, whose mother is Japanese, spent part of her childhood in Japan, and later returned as an adult.

Respirator Garment

      Not that she aspires to work in a traditional Japanese idiom. "I went to Japan and took sumi-e lessons. We would meditate when we were making our ink (by rubbing an ink stone). I hated it! Everyone was getting all meditative and I'm, like, oh my God!" she says, rolling her eyes. But she has developed her own form of this meditative approach. She describes her mind-set while drawing as a trance-like state. Like a sumi-e artist sitting serenely before her pool of ink and brush, Jameson alone with her materials gets into "this weird state" from which her work springs.
      Given her roots in Dada and Surrealism, Jameson's drawing process may also have affinities with André Breton's "automatic writing," but it is not a free-form outpouring of images from the unconscious. "I do a lot of research with historical costume and also industrial safety garments. That's from a British fireman's outfit from the 1800s," she says, indicating the contraption covering the face of the figure in the drawing "Respirator Garment." The corners of Jameson's studio are piled with books and prints depicting astronaut suits, vintage bondage wear, and 16th century French aristocrats in stiff, elaborate collars.
      Jameson's drawings are also the product the self-scrutiny Jameson underwent in grad school (she holds an MFA from Mills College), where she was compelled to explain the images that were occurring in her art. Extensive, detailed feedback from art school professors "got me focused, got me thinking about [my art], where before it was all intuitive, and now it's half and half. Half intuitive and half thinking about it."

Sweet Fear

      Without the analytical side, the work would not have its intense focus and intellectual heft. Jameson thinks that getting too analytical, on the other hand, would result in her becoming "a technique artist," bereft of spontaneity and intuition. Research and other left-brain activity bears the same relationship to her work that waking life does to dreaming. One informs the other, which then takes on an autonomous reality.
      Besides drawing, Jameson also does sculpture and performance work. Her 3D pieces include knitted garments with distorted proportions, like "Safe and Warm?" a teeny-tiny dress with alarmingly long sleeves, and large-scale pieces such as "Sweet Fear," an 8-foot-high piece of carved Styrofoam covered with rock candy, whose shape suggests both a Victorian skirt and a palaeolithic fertility goddess.
      2002 promises to be a breakout year for Jameson. In mid-July she is mounting simultaneous shows at the Henry Art Gallery and Ballard Fetherston Gallery. The Henry show, entitled "Splendorform," will feature old and new work juxtaposed with structured undergarments Jameson has selected from the Henry's collection of historical costumes. The undergarments include corsets, crinolines, and rocket bras from the 1880s through the 1950s. Jameson says, "I chose undergarments because they are for one, beautiful as objects, two, rarely seen in costume exhibitions, which like to show the full outfits, and three, work conceptually with my art."

Bespoke Chemical Suit

      Robin Held, a curator at the Henry Art Gallery sees "Splendorform" as an opportunity to show a fuller range of Jameson's work than is generally seen. "Her most recent gallery shows have primarily been her drawings," says Held. "I wanted to bring all of the various forms of her art together, so what we have is almost a mini-retrospective of her work, including performance documentation."
      Some of the new drawings for the two shows are on a much larger scale than most of her work, and have a sharp-edged graphic quality that represents a break from her usual style. Jameson is pleased and surprised by the appearance of this new style. "I don't know what I'm doing, but I like it. It's all about the edges. The crisp black against the white."

Cloak of Secrecy

      Jameson's drawings are varied in style but united in the obsessions to which they give light. Her charcoal figures--almost always depicted in a coldly objective middle distance, trapped under the gaze of the viewer like specimens under glass--have a distinct odor of chloroform. Jameson once expressed her approval of my description of her work as exhibiting a "mental patient aesthetic."
      Like the stories of Kafka, Jameson's drawings have a strong undercurrent of dark laughter. "Some people do think they're funny," says Jameson, "and I respect those people a lot, because they get beyond the immediate odd or scary nature which seems to be the first take." Hers is a distinctive sense of humor. It contains fear, but not cruelty: thoroughly absurd though the figures may be, they are not figures of ridicule. We see them with something almost like sympathy.