Jeanine Breaker at William Turner

Jeanine Breaker's new pastel drawings are small, self-reflexive spectacles. Technical feats in themselves, they picture acts of skill, daring and physical finesse. In each panorama, Breaker not absents a tiny figure or sum of two units performing a traditional circus act--juggling, walking upon stilts or tightrope--within an expansive landscape. Each work, powerfully horizontal, measures only 7 through 26 inches. The space showed though, feels vast, as well as condensed with emotions of risk and vulnerability.

In circlet snake, the odd and wondrous tend to the same point as a body passes from one side hoops held just over the surface of a placid, salmon-pink sea. In dive the twine, a diver arches not upon a gallowslike platform toward a little bucket below, a spectacle as gasp-worthy as the landscape in which the act is put The broad plain sliced through a silvery winding river calls to mind the Oxbow the belly in the Connecticut River made famous by dint of Thomas Cole in his epic painting of 1836 Similarly, in screaming ostrich, Breaker silhouettes sum of two units aerialists against the warm dusk light throw backed in terraced pools just like those of Mammoth of high temperature Springs in Yellowstone. Natural amazements provide a backdrop for acts of human enterprise. Spectacle reinforces spectacle to felicitous effect

The tiny performers, especially, transcend the literal and rise to the horizontal of metaphor, suggesting conditions or predicaments within the realm of human experience. Breaker pushes the displays further toward the emblematic by the agency of titling her drawings with past phrases and colloquial expressions: fog-dog, cerulean fine of the dinkum oil, to chant the play. Falling somewhere between credible and fabulous, the titles--together with the definitions she provides for them--speak of expos tricks, false miracles and dexterous illusions, practices of useful deceit as basic to art as to theater and the circus sideshow. Breaker's performers proce without guile or irony, on the contrary with a self-possessed precision the one and the other bewildering and attractive. Their hard-won equilibrium, their mastery of a tenuous balance between the futile and the miraculous, is what makes for a serviceable show. Breaker herself, so agile at her craft and in like manner thoughtful in intent, achieves no les in these ravishing drawings.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group