First, She’s a Lady! Exhibition at Tikhonova Wintner Fine Art Gallery, 2015
Laura Elkins: Summer in the City portraits
The self-portrait has always been an artist’s most intriguing vehicle for analysis and self-expression. Laura Elkins paints herself as everywoman; fascinated by the ways we conduct ourselves in society and how our society perceives us.
Elkins is an American painter — an urban, progressive, mature female, living in Washington DC. Her interest in self-portraiture is a recent trend. Elkins’ early work addressed her experience as wife and mother, culminating in an art-and-architecture project that expresses the complexities of family life, while providing a home for her family. The scale of this early work reflects her background and career as an architect. Starting in 2000, Elkins has focused on producing self-portraits that experiment boldly with modes of dress and a seemingly inexhaustible inventory of emotions.
“Summer in the City” is a series platformed on the celebrity of first ladies, and also a book with a forward by curator Yulia Tikhonova. This series of expressive oil-on-canvas self-portraits references traditional banal summertime amusements or indulgences: eating popcorn, snorkeling, playing tennis — if you can call carrying a gun in one hand at all times while pretending to be one of our First Ladies, “banal.”
Elkins paints fast, and the final work always retains the fresh qualities of a sketch. Her head is frontal and meets our eyes with an exaggerated — almost caricature-like — facial expression, aggressively red lips, and nose in the air. Her hairstyle and its color vary from portrait to portrait. She wears different hats and outfits ranging from a Yankees cap to a Trayvon Martin-inspired hoodie. With the hand that does not paint, her subject firmly grasps a gun — yes, Elkins is actually holding the gun as she paints. The infinitely fascinating Jackie Kennedy gets several versions: one with snorkel and gun, another reading Foucault.
Elkins obviously enjoys this masquerade. Her inventive facility as a painter bestows a freedom to try on many personae. Her passion for painting is unmistakable, as is her ambition to paint her way out of this murky world we have inherited, and into the clear light of a new dawn. She engages this gift with a lusty joy that we both envy and fear. This is a woman who knows her mind and won’t brook any obstructions placed in her way.
Like Whitman, Elkins embraces multitudes; but her multitudes are the personae we carry hidden just beneath the surface that are out of bounds in polite society. Elkins at work is pure id, unrestrained. If Lacan were watching over her shoulder he would recognize her painting as true jouissance, an ecstatic encounter of artist and medium whose offspring is a fiery prophetic vision.
Even with the ever-present gun, Elkins is having fun with her portraits. She holds the gun in her hand, next to her cheek, close to her hair. She plays with the gun as if it is a toy, cavalierly wiggling it in her hands. She embraces the pleasures of summer-in-the-city, with its occasional boredom and heat-caused madness. Is the gun a reference to the madness of the rich and famous? Or is it a more pragmatic and political reckoning with a world where guns are fired without reason or logic, just because they are there, or because an accident of birth has made someone a profile, instead of a person?
Shootings and bombings obey no season, but the summer is our shared time for joy and play outdoors, and thus we experience summer’s tragedies communally, viscerally. Remember the 2013 Boston Marathon! Elkins-with-gun self-portraits have a powerful and uncanny impact. They remind us that while we are preoccupied with personal, and often trivial pursuits, others are suffering extremes of physical and mental brutality.
Elkins uses another unnerving reference: in each self-portrait she adopts the familiar persona of one of our recent First Ladies. “Self as Hillary with Sunglasses,” “Self as Betty Eating Popcorn,“ “Self as Michelle Eating a Lime Skittle,” are only a few of her titles. By attributing just the right (and easily identified) stylistic eccentricity to each First Lady, Elkins takes on their personae while remaining the unambiguous subject being rendered. This tension between subject and persona is at the heart of her work and is the source of its destabilizing power on the viewer. She is the ventriloquist who commandeers the behavior and voice of her impersonations.
Elkins’ playful attitude extends to the titles she appends as if they were another stylistic adornment, like a vast wardrobe of summery dresses. She provokes the viewer with her bold comparisons between herself and the First Ladies (Washington’s matinee idols) but does it tactfully, with the benign satire of a person who came of age in the political atmosphere of the 1970s and 80s.
And if Elkins links herself with the highly charged social and political significance of these women who share a bed with the most powerful man on earth, she does so to convey that the First Ladies are real people like us, only more so, as they must restrain themselves from revealing even a hint of unchecked id, in public.
While Cindy Sherman quickly comes to mind in any consideration of Elkins’ work, Elkins follows her own trajectory. Martha Wilson as Tipper Gore is perhaps a more direct antecedent, by way of role-playing, costume transformations, and “invasions” of other people’s personae.
Self-portraiture raises questions of personal identity in relation to social, historical and gender issues. Elkins, who invokes the almost sacred personae of our beloved First Ladies in order to confront and skewer our contemporary mores, addresses these questions with her hypersensitive artist’s antennae fully extended. The message she brings back: when the First Ladies crack, run for cover.