At La Luz de Jesus Gallery through October 27th, Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman invites viewers to step inside her dreams.
Her new exhibition Heavy Water is pure vision, a deepening of her work, in which the viewer literally and figuratively can wade into an alchemic world awash in portent. Her characters are girls caught in a perpetual, magical youth, suffused with golden light. Sullivan-Beeman explains her paintings as a “dive headfirst into the soup of the collective unconscious. There, in the most ancient realm of the mind, I inherit stories. Like water, I draw my girls up from the deepest well.”
The title of this exhibition refers to what the artist describes as “the rarest and most dangerous substance on Earth… made from ordinary tap water.” She posits that no one would notice the difference should the material replace the water coming from one’s tap, H20 turned to the lethal D20, “a stepping stone towards the atomic bomb.” First produced in 1932 and used in nuclear energy research, in Sullivan-Beeman’s dream world, her girls use the material for creation instead of destruction.
Each painting is created in the artist’s signature style, using egg tempera, the time-consuming artistic process once employed by the Old Masters. The medium she uses, as well as being unique today, inherently carries a quality of luminance. Her most delicate images seem to glow with power.
Viewers are encouraged to begin their journey through Heavy Water with Sulllivan-Beeman’s installation, in which she makes use of both stencils and sculptural elements to take viewers to the bottom of the sea, where jelly fish swim and kelp beds sway. The immersive quality of her laser-cut giant 6-foot seahorse, still-dressed skeleton, glittery treasure chest, and giant rabbit are pulled straight from her paintings; some elements of the installation were collaborated with artist Gina M. “I really want the viewer to experience the whole show and ‘swim’ through the art,” Sullivan-Beeman relates.
Somehow the oversized 3D sculptural images feel perfectly natural, as if they’ve emerged from within the paintings; this is due at least in part to the fact that the paintings have a depth in technique that makes them feel richly dimensional.
The paintings lead viewers through images that traverse the natural and fantastical world, through history and daydreams, all alight from within. While it might seem unlikely to create work that takes the figurative to the edge of surreal, Sullivan-Beeman has done so, shaping a narrative not unlike a sci-fi Beatrix Potter. Mystical, magical and powerfully practical, the girls in Sullivan-Beeman’s works represent the artist’s own subconscious, a world of fairytales and innocence, of struggle and resistance, of wisdom and self-realization.
In “Alchemy Girl,” a smoky-eyed, pink-haired girl reclines on a desk pouring heavy water into a beaker, while a human-sized rabbit somewhat frantically writes atomic equations on a blackboard behind her. She is clad in a blue dress with white pinafore reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland; perhaps Alice and the White Rabbit now exist in an alternate universe. Her intense, forthright gaze challenges the viewer: she has the power.
With “Finding Marilyn Girl,” we also see echoes of Alice. There’s a white rabbit of sorts – with a skull face – tucked under the arm of a girl wearing the Mad Hatter’s headgear. She peers into an opening in a tree, through which Marilyn Monroe’s visage floats – a search for something lost, aspects of powerful gain. Who controls life’s game here? Alice has bested both hatter and rabbit, and has exhumed the ghost and grandeur of a fairy-tale movie star. There is also an Alice-like vested rabbit steering the boat of a languid “Lotus Girl.”
The wild-haired, haunting “Gas Mask Girl” has a perfect bird perched on the hose to her mask; she may be at risk, but she has secured herself, and the bird – a promise for a brighter future, perhaps – has aligned with her.
“Ascending Girl” arises from water in a beam of holy light, as UFOs fly overhead, a toucan watches, and another girl, clad in a bathing suit and clutching a beach ball, looks on. From this fecund, tropical world, a girl chooses to fly upward and onward, heading to a place few of us can imagine, much less aspire, to go.
The entire exhibition is filled with beautiful, loving images – butterflies and sea life, a squirrel interested in a fallen Snow White’s discarded apple, an adorable hedgehog, a minute giraffe, a glorious pink flamingo. And of course, Sullivan-Beeman’s fascinating, complicated, magical girls.
If art is a realized dream, then Sullivan-Beeman’s works a dream within a dream. It’s time to take a deep dive into her Heavy Water.
La Luz de Jesus Gallery is located at 4633 Hollywood Blvd.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by Deirdre Sullivan-Beeman and Genie Davis