Dreams and Danger: the Art of Austin Eddy
In February 2020, Eddy woke one day to a splitting migraine and a fever. In his delirium, a flash of inspiration came to him; looks can kill.
He began painting portraits on knives when he recovered a week later. The faces flash murderous looks with startling reality; they pierce us viewers with their gaze.
We now know that COVID-19 was spreading quickly in cities on the West Coast, including Portland, OR, where Eddy lives and works. It is likely that he had contracted the deadly virus six weeks before the world went into lockdown to curb its spread.
The knife portraits are some of the works on display in Eddy’s solo exhibition This Art Is Not Safe at the Ford Gallery in Portland, OR, up now until July 22nd, 2020. Not only are the knives potentially dangerous weapons, but holding an exhibition at all during the pandemic is unsafe.
Instead of throwing wide the doors and letting gallery goers flood in, the opening on June 27th morphed into a virtual tour that was live-streamed on Facebook and Instagram. Gallery Director Sara McCormick interviewed Eddy while touring the space. You can watch the videos here.
Themes of danger, anxiety, and fear mix with dreamy fantasy throughout the exhibition. Eddy has the uncanny ability to create cinematic art; still pictures where we imagine what happens next in the scene. It is a skill he has honed over the years; Eddy has held many jobs working as an animator on films such as The Hobbit, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and Avatar.
In recent years Eddy has turned his hand to oil painting. His narrative paintings have an ambiguity that draws many viewers in and holds them there, contemplating what the images mean to them personally. Viewers may take away different meanings from the works, all of which Eddy feels are perfectly valid; there are no wrong answers here.
And viewers did contemplate and draw their own conclusions; poet Alanna Fagan and musician Matthew Capurro collaborated with filmmaker Pippin Beard to create short films based on the art in the exhibition. What resulted were beautiful, introspective film interpretations of Eddy’s visions. Capurro’s dreamy piano thoughtfully accompanies Fagan’s brooding, cinematic poetry. You can watch the videos here.
Dreamy scenes are a staple of Eddy’s work. In Sunrise on a City of Forgotten Dreams, dreamscapes intermingle on the picture plane like something from a Surrealist film. A sultry nude reclines in one overlay, while pedestrians bustle through the rain at night in another overlay. The warm glow of a sunrise pokes over the city after a storm, alluding to the hope of a new day. Eddy’s self-portrait is hidden in a line of buildings, suggesting that this was all a dream he had.
In Northwest Dreaming a woman stands with eyes closed in front of a highway overpass, billboards, and an electrical tower. Eddy says that “It’s that big freeway interchange that runs over NW Portland and it connects the Fremont Bridge to the 405 and the Interstate 30. I was definitely interested in creating the feeling of movement coming from different directions, or the symbolism of the intersection, a place where many paths crossover, and energy is literally flowing in different directions.”
He goes on to say that “the figure is becoming one with the environment; the silhouette of the figure blending into the architecture of the overpasses is reminiscent of a dream like vision.” The crows, which are common to Portland, are symbols of change — something that we are all experiencing these days.
My personal favorite in the show is The Soul of a Place, where a woman’s head evaporates into a misty powder. Her hand is placed over her chest, conjuring up the expression ‘Home is where the heart is.’
Eddy states that “I wanted to capture the feeling of a place holding something special for someone, or the memory of a place. I think often when people reflect back on a place, it can affect you as a person… I wanted [the painting] to have this ethereal and timeless quality to it, and so I incorporated this dissolution of her physical body and I incorporated another character in there to add to the story.”
There is a final surprise as you come near the end of the cavernous gallery packed with Eddy’s work: blank canvases mounted over troughs of water. Viewers are invited to interact with paintings; that is, to paint them with water. It’s a novel idea. I’ve seen conceptual and performance art that invite viewer participation, but never paintings.
As you paint with water, the image is slowly revealed to you. Eddy explains that the secret is coating the paintings in an industrial packing material that becomes translucent when wet. When it dries it becomes opaque, once again concealing the image beneath. The paintings contain apparitions that have the ability to haunt over and over, all at the beckon call of the person who wields the wet brush.
Overall, the exhibition reveals the scope of Eddy’s narrative powers and his mastery of the brush. The images give you a sense of uneasiness, as if one of those knives might jump off the wall and attack at any moment. But as you get further into it, you start to realize that these images are dreams manifest in waking life. There’s some reassurance in that; just as your nightmares might be scary and anxiety-ridden, when you wake you understand that it was all just a dream.
The Ford Gallery was hoping to host an exhibition closing party, but plans have been derailed due to the recent spike in virus cases. The good news is that you can view the work in This Art is Not Safe anytime online at the Ford Gallery website. Additional artwork can be found at Eddy’s website or on Instagram.
Jen Brown is a narrative painter, curator, and art historian working in Portland, OR. She has a Master’s degree in Art History and a diploma in Curatorial Studies. Her work may be seen on her website, Instagram or on Medium (Artist Jen Brown). She writes daily about narrative painting on Instagram or at narrativepainting.net.
