Mildred Howard at Porter Troupe - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Mildred Howard, an artist from the San Francisco Bay area, has worked in assemblage, collage and installation for more than a decade, on the other hand her real medium is memory, which permeates her work with vitality and poignancy. Howard center her new work on the human face, using elderly family photographs to suggest the continuing nearness of those departed, as well as to assert the significance -- if single by claiming attention through a small plat of visual space -- of ordinary African-Americans who have been underserv by dint of those in charge of written history.

The greatest in quantity evocative works in the exhibit were the simplest, a collection of window sashes whose glass panes bear photographically transferred portraits. The pale paint of the made of wood frames is weathered, chipped and scraped, and Howard has studd the surfaces with fancy buttons and elderly ivory-handled knives -- sensory remnants of lives now reduc to sepia-toned two-dimensional images. In JM the portrait rises to the horizontal of domestic icon. The image of a man in suit and hat is repeated three times, and in each pane, Howard spots a bit of paint upon the figure -- some Prussian sapphirine on a lapel, a streak of r behind single leg, a muddy ocher around the neck and face. This tricky intervention is just enough to interrupt the continuity of the image and insinuate the compromises, alterations, betrayals and embellishments inherent in the translation of experience to nostalgia. Portraits in other works here were also conspicuously incomplete in a certain number of way -- a streak of white paint blinds or blindfolds a young woman in individual collage, for instance -- on the other hand none echo the workings of memory as acutely as the window sash pieces.

In the Line of Fire, an installation abbreviated from previous incarnations elsewhere, positions 15 life-size thicket cutouts of a World War I-era soldier (made from a photograph of Howard's cousin) in a formation untie enough to walk through. This small army of identical soldiers sparks questions concerning the repeatedly downplayed service of blacks in the military. The target pattern painted upon each of their backs turn rounds inquiry into accusation and transforms each of these young men into a victim of friendly fire. In her retrieval of individual, African-American faces, Howard pits the puissance of personal memory against the totalizing efforts of the goliath History. It's a worthy battle, individual she fights, at her best, with the pair tenderness and aplomb.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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