Patricia Bellan-Gillen. Willful Wondering: Drawings 2011-2016

Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh

By Kristina Olson

Roaming this large exhibition of recent drawings was akin to stepping into a life-sized children’s pop-up book. Patricia Bellan-Gillen’s prolific output over the last five years comes in three formats included here: smaller colored pencil and collaged works, painterly large-scale pencil and acrylic drawings on birch, and mixed-media installations that move from two to three dimensions. All use fairytale imagery coupled with historical and contemporary references to create an entrancing mood shaded by darker forces.

Patricia Bellan-Gillen, The Lure of the Rabbit and the Pull of the Whale/Till Human Voices Wake Us (detail), 2016, colored pencil, hand cut digitally printed-paper flowers, wood, model boat, 148” x 150” x 209” (variable). Courtesy of the artist.

An absorbing example dominates one floor. The Lure of the Rabbit and the Pull of the Whale/Till Human Voices Wake Us (2016) begins as a huge wall drawing of a rabbit’s head that transitions to a flattened body of collaged paper flowers with grimacing faces.  These tumble to the floor, creating a carpet that snakes across the gallery terminating in a spindly child’s chair topped with a pink model of a square rigger. Teetering between cute and creepy, the installation introduces the artist’s dominant theme of innocent wonder versus authoritative control. Figures inspired by children’s stories, illustrations and animated films-especially Alice in Wonderland-are imperiled by the adult abyss of harm and deceit alluded to throughout with references to the whaling ship’s destructive pursuit in Moby Dick.

Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Distortion and Distraction/Ratatoskr, 2014, colored pencil, acrylic, and gouache on birch, 82” x 120.” Courtesy of the artist.

Elsewhere, images of the rabbit and other magical animals, Alice or substitute girls, and a host of literary and mythical characters from Lot’s wife to Pinocchio repeat the theme of squelched imagination. In Every Day Wear (2015), a girl in profile wears a dress of surveilling eyes that shrouds her body leaving no outlet for her arms. Distortion and Distraction/Ratatoskr (2014) presents a nightmare-sized rabbit dangling a chain of televisions broadcasting a black-and-white “dazzle” pattern over a group of entranced little girls. The title refers to a character in Norse mythology while the camouflaged screens comment on our current intoxication with the distorted information delivered on electronic devices.

The most recent work, Blind Spots 1, 2 and 3 (all 2016), moves into new and affecting territory. These monumental triptychs form a three-sided installation with an elaborate, distorted cartouche and putti figures rendered in grisaille repeated across the birch panels. The theme of control and propaganda is taken to a sophisticated level. The artist’s love for the cadence of words is often a starting point leading to further research here. The rich imagery prompted by the subtitles for Blind Spots 1/Cruel Poetics illustrates this word/image connection. Earth Centered Universe evokes the challenges to church doctrine by early astronomers. The Open Polar Sea recalls the deadly search for the fictive northern passageway in the nineteenth century while Les Rouge summons the red trousers French soldiers continued to wear during World War I, making them easy targets. White blind spots at the center of each architectural ornament provide a visual equivalent for these cautionary tales of misinformation with dire consequence.

Patricia Bellan-Gillen, Blind Spots 1/Cruel Poetics (triptych), 2015, colored pencil, acrylic, silverpoint ground and collage on birch, 115” x 266.” Courtesy of the artist.

The engrossing exhibit demonstrates this established artist’s fresh commitment to the power of drawing and themes of innocence, wonder, deceit and regulation. Recently retired from a long teaching career at Carnegie Mellon University, she has produced a bravura body of work that is visually seductive and conceptually deep. Bellan-Gillen doesn’t suggest how to get out of the rabbit hole of manipulated knowledge we’ve fallen into, but she does provide an enchanted environment from which to contemplate our predicament.

(June 11 - July 17, 2016)

Kristina Olson is associate director of the School of Art & Design at West Virginia University, a contributor to ARTPULSE and exhibition reviews editor for Art Inquiries.

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