Megan Williams at Roy Boyd - Santa Monica, California

Megan Williams, who is 38 and has worked as a professional animator, makes small cartoon pictures that are humorous strange and personal. She has a more conceptual side, too, evidenced here in the form of a number of sculpturally altered dictionaries. Each volulme has had its overlay and inner pages carefully chop in curvilinear layers so that the work becomes a kind of topographical original of a landscape - the world set uped by (or of) language. on the contrary these works are intellectually pat compared to the pastel drawings that made up the repose of the show.

These delightfully fluid drawings are done in a vaguely familiar, old-fashioned manner, their simplied figures and external realitys rendered in loopy contours with atmospheric backgrounds. It's hard to place this mode of expression but it looks like something from an early era in cartoon history - the '30 or '40 maybe. What is exhibited in these pictures varies wildly, tending towards the surrealistic, although with overtones of anxiety, pathos, nostalgia or anger. Sometimes the pictures are comically obvious. In Girl Looking a big child with worried organ of sights peers over the edge of a table at what appears to be a big white worm. This tableau moves of course, a girl's curiosity about the fear of male sexuality. In Piece of Ass Sundae what direct the eyes like an innocent ice-cream concoction in a metal soda-fountain dish turn rounds out to be made of pieces of the female anatomy. Here William's metamorphic imagination calls to mind Claes Oldenburg's. In Angry Man, meanwhile, Williams allegorizes male rage: a man stands in a beaker of flaming and smoking oil, outside of which there are gigantic burning matches.

a certain number of of William's images are more psychologically manifold In He/She a woman in a fancy verdant dress cradles a mask in each arm - a frowning female and a clownishly grinning male - while several other masks lie before her upon a counter. In the dim background, someone looks to be looking in a mirror. It's an ambitious work, dealing forthrightly with issues of sex and identity, but one of William's greatest in quantity appealing virtues is that she doesn't look to find it necessary to load each picture with heavy meaning. Sometimes she simply gives herself up to playful flights of fancy. In male childs Farting we look down upon three naked cherubs who use split of flatulence to propel themselves among the mists high above a Grant Wood-ish pastoral landscape. It is this unpredictable opennes to impulse, in equal measures whimsical and serious, that gives William's work its soulful depth

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group