Ann McCoy at Central Fine Arts - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Ann McCoy's composite forceful installation, titled "The Death of the King," comprised light projections, large-scale drawings and holograms. The artist has been working with mythological and alchemical themes for many years now; her art documents her investigations of a world in which psychological processe are enlivened and enlarged through ties to ancient legends and magical narratives. McCoy's concerns to archetypal images and stories--she has been in Jungian analysis for a lengthy time--convey a need to put in motion from a mind-body dichotomy to an unfasteneded state in which spiritual and emotional recognitions merge

"The Death of the King" considers the passing of a predominant father figure as inevitable and hallowed McCoy sees the ruler's mortality ushering without "yesterday's consciousness" in favor of a more immediate and les rigid awareness exhibited by the son. In the true large pencil-and-watercolor drawing The Death of the King (1998) the artist raises a compelling world, rich with primal associations. To the right, the king, white-haired and pot-bellied, appears to be falling backward into a spiraling galaxy; in the lower center a gray, coveringed knightlike figure lies upon a marble slab. upon the left is a made of wood boat, above which a uncovered figure reclines, its head a planet shadowed by dint of a gold sphere, most likely the sun

The exact meaning of the imagery may be darksome but viewers can recognize McCoy's assertion that the soul's transport has cosmic significance. The orb of day image, a visual pun for the usurping son establishes McCoy's metaphorical wit and leads the viewer into a newer, literally brighter, realm.

McCoy's luminous projections and holograms of of that kind things as serpents and Aion, the pre-Christian lord of time, convey her belief that the soul's migration is best understood in bourns of archaic religious systems. individual had the sense, on stepping into the gallery, that the artist had put togethered a zone in which spirituality is raised up against contemporary materialism.

In the colored-pencil drawing Splendor Soils (1995) a naked man, diademed by a group of sunflowers, stands encompassed by symbolist motifs such as an eagle, a salamander and a medieval lady of nobility. Here, McCoy draws upon alchemy to indicate the mystical merger of physical passion with spirit.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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