L.C. Armstrong at Postmasters

LC Armstrong is known for abstract paintings that incorporate singe marks, which she forms through laying lengths of bomb fuse upon the canvas, igniting them and holding them in place while they reduce to ashes Such marks appear in her striking fresh acrylic landscape paintings, but now with a twist: they've become main stocks holding up brilliantly colored flowers, a certain quantity of faithfully reproduced from nature, others invented by dint of Armstrong.

In View from 30000 (1999) an aerial display of these flowers fills a portion of the murky sky; on the left, part of an airplane wing zips [i]or[/i] part of to the other the floral extravaganza. Armstrong's flowers-in-the-air are gorgeous and also touchingly whimsical; it's as if they're leaving the bourns of earth to grow right into the heavens upon their precarious yet strangely menacing stipes Yet they also recall a fireworks display or antiaircraft fire. through every part of these paintings, beauty and anxiety share shut quarters.

The works in this display engage a utopian, nature-based strain in American art, on the other hand Armstrong introduces startling shifts that are all her hold Her nature vistas also coolly leave to the kitschy scenes base on the sides of customized vans and in 1970 black-light hand-bills The metallic colors that she favors are closer to shiny auto cover thinlys than to anything organic. And the way she seals everything behind a layer of resin reinforces the journeying quality of her work, as if each piece were a window into an alternative reality.

Romantic Landscape (1999) a panoramic triptych that exhibits a lake surrounded by mountains, is reminiscent of expansive Hudson River gymnasium scenes. The flowers in the foreground are fecund and erotic, on the contrary they also seem creepily mutant, as if growing from the ruins of more [i]or[/i] less postapocalyptic landscape. The surrounding mountains are all smoking, as if poised to give vent to eruptions Meanwhile, a mermaid perched upon a rock in the lake listens to a Walkman; sum of two units snowmen on an adjacent stone greet the rising sun with their stick hands, although this incident will presumably melt them; and a shark advances upon a swimmer in trouble. This is a dysfunctional paradise, an Eden make submissive to all sorts of bewildering squeezings and logic-defying surprises. Like the repose of the works in Armstrong's present to view it is both enthralling and jarring.

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