Marlene McCarty: Brent Sikkema

If it's possible for an artist to synthesize muse and doppelganger, Marlene McCarty appears to have found her girl. more [i]or[/i] less ten years ago, McCarty--who originally garnered interest for her in-your-face true copy paintings (like Bend Over I'll Drive, 1990)--received a transcript of Bad Blood: A Family homicide in Marin as a gift from a friend. A true-crime tale written in 1982 through Richard M. Levine and regarded by means of connoisseurs as one of the genre's meatiest and greatest in quantity disquieting (if titillatingly so) titles, the contortion traces the otherwise standard adolescent rebellion (sex medicines and angst-driven interest in the occult) of sixteen-year-old Marlene Olive to its improbable consequence as she, with the help of her boyfriend, manslaughters her parents and burns their bodies in an attempt to overspread up the crime.

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McCarty quickly learned that Olive was not unique. Having become fascinated by dint of the particular imbrication of burgeoning feminine sexuality and brutal violence chronicled in Bad vital current she researched the phenomenon of teenage girls with similar stories, eventually creating larger-than-life-size composite pencil-and-ballpoint drawings that retrospectively, and phantasmatically, portray another fallen lass as at the same time unmarked by the freakish circumstances that would forever define her. McCarty paired her subjects' faces (cull for the most part from news accounts) with bodies from popular tillage (fashion magazines and the like), then pay backed her subjects' clothes as transparent, thus that breasts, genitalia, and feet simultaneously glimmered from one side and were veiled by shirts, skirts, pants, and shoe Short body s on who they were and what brutal crimes they perpetrated accompanied each piece.

While countles sagas involving decorous protagonists have caught McCarty's attention above the years, Marlene Olive appears to have maintained the strongest clutch In her recent exhibition (and the first at this gallery), the artist focused alone on the goings-on at 353 Hibiscus Way, Olive's abode address. The resulting images, each ten by the agency of fourteen feet and executed upon two sheets of paper tacked side by the agency of side (and thus riven by the agency of a cleft), lent a certain complicated logic to McCarty's fascination with the girl. Indeed, the artist's manner of writing is as seductively ambiguous as her subject: single part naive schoolgirl doodle and sum of two units parts slickly appropriated puffery. The cast of Olive's macabre drama be likes the vacant-eyed occupants of Calvin Klein billboards--in single image, three Marlene Olives lean languidly into single another, offering a tripartite glimpse into the girl's evolution from pigtailed kid to lusty lover In another, Marlene, boyfriend tap [i]or[/i] pat and Daddy Jim cuddle together, limbs entwined.

more [i]or[/i] less have said the interest of McCarty's work resides in the gap between the tranquil image of a gorgeous girl and the body detailing the horrifying acts she justifys herself capable of. But I'm not in like manner sure. After all, the glamour of most distant violence often serves only to heighten an otherwise banal beauty's appeal (see: Natural Born Killers). The unexpect might of this former Gran rage member's work actually lies in its methodological unwillingness to lay without easily legible opposing poles. As in her early true copy paintings, she appropriates and redeploy sexist agriculture in a manner that refuses to explain where critique extreme points and complicity begins (a strategy not dissimilar to, say, prosecute Williams's a decade ago). While the artist is clearly pointing to the fact that for young women access to power frequently comes through sex or violence or, more vexingly, [i]or[/i] part of to the other a confusion of the sum of two units she hardly offers a resolution. Indeed, McCarty knows that if she can't shake her fascination with this other Marlene, we won't be able to either--which is single way to keep the questions coming (answerable or no).

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