This time around artist Lydia Anne McCarthy created three images in conjunction with the Still Life Masterpieces exhibition. McCarthy, a graduate of the UNC–Chapel Hill MFA program, spent the past year living and working in Sweden. Her desire to return to Sweden, to the people, culture, and landscape that she fell in love with, informs the billboards she created. The work is an homage to her time spent exploring the landscape, a manifestation of her desire to return, and a recognition of the impossibility of longing.

In her photographs McCarthy evinces her memories of “wandering through the forest to pick berries and mushrooms; stray reindeer roaming the highways; and the stark rugged terrain spotted with lakes and filled with wildflowers,” but, forced into existence, they have decayed. McCarthy makes reference to traditional still-life paintings, as well as the tropes of advertising and studio photography, causing a disconnect between the beauty and allure of the form and the unappealing objects depicted within. The form produces an expectation of desire, but the content is undesirable, thus “creating tension between what is photographed and how it is photographed.”

McCarthy’s photographs are also steeped in the tradition of vanitas, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17^th century. Vanitas symbolizes the inevitability of death and the transience and hubris of earthly achievements and pleasures. Skulls, rotten fruit, mirrors, and scholarly objects are often signposts of this tradition. Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s Vanitas Still Life (1668), with its skull, broken lyre, papers, and nearly burnt-out candle, and John Frederick Peto’s Student’s Materials (circa 1890–1900), depicting a book with its cover dangling by a thread and melted candle, are excellent examples of the vanitas tradition in Still-Life Masterpieces. The molding strawberries and cheese, animal skull, mirrors, and art books in McCarthy’s pictures are more than memories of Sweden—they are also traditional symbols of vanitas. These works are an acknowledgment by the artist that, like the fruit in Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, her own desire (to relive her time in Sweden) “is unsustainable and with time passing, will begin to decay.”

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images:
Lydia Anne McCarthy, Osthyvel, handduk, blommor och blåbär, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Renskalle med böcker, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

The latest installation features work by Raleigh artist Nancy S. Baker. You may be familiar with Baker’s work; her painting The Betrayal is part of the Museum’s permanent collection and is on view on Level A in East Building.

Nancy’s billboards are fun and funky, an interesting take on existing works. “Borrowing from three exalted artists from the NCMA’s American collection, mingling highbrow and lowbrow taste, I offer up three reinvented and reconfigured tableaus of the American tradition of landscape painting,” Baker says.

Her willing (or unwilling) subjects? Bierstadt’s Bridal Veil Falls, Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador, and Inness’s Under the Greenwood. But viewers might not recognize them—the paintings have been bisected and then digitally reflected back onto themselves, as if by a funhouse mirror or a kaleidoscope. Suddenly something familiar becomes something new, strange, and even a bit disturbing. Surrounding the altered landscapes is a border of jewels, flowers, staring eyes, and other strange elements, acting, as Baker puts it, as “a Looney Tunes memento mori, in stark contrast to the dreamy realism of the [original] paintings.”

Baker links this memento mori theme with the title of her billboard series: Home Sweet Home. As she notes, “The title, appropriated from John Howard Payne’s ubiquitous poem, reminds us that ‘Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ However, the idea of home in [works such as] Mignot’s Landscape in Ecuador has become an historical rendering of a world now on the verge of self-destruction. Through no fault of Mignot, this unreliable narrative of fecund nature is testimony to our desire for fantasy. Like the oeuvre of Norman Rockwell, art can be the greatest and most convincing propaganda.” Baker’s works allow us to ponder important questions of reality vs. fiction, and how that distinction—or lack thereof—affects the natural world today.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Our Bierstadt has a history in contemporary art! Check out this post from 2008, which links the painting to an artist at the Brooklyn Museum–Ed.