HILARY IRONS
SHEETROCK MOUNTAIN
August 30 – September 23, 2006

Aucocisco Gallery is proud to present “Sheetrock Mountain,” an exhibition of new drawings and paintings by Hilary Irons.  Irons pastoral landscapes set the stage for narrative scenes of women and animals engaged in conflict, exploitation, and oppression.  Complex harmonies of earth tones are juxtaposed with punctuations of vibrant day-glo decorative elements.  Early inspiration from early German printmakers, such as Martin Schongauer, is evident in the use of linear definition and symbolic gestures.  Irons’ fluid use of perspective and patterning create stunning visual abstractions woven with figural allegories.  

Irons’ fables explore conflict in an imagined matriarchal society, where women reject their traditional characterizations as selfless, nurturing mother-figures, and instead engage in sometimes violent power plays.  Animals flee in fear or are forced into domestic service.  Critic Carl Davulis characterizes the relationship between the women and animals as abusive: “Irons forces us to consider the cruelty that the oppressed can enact on each other, reproducing their subaltern status as they bully their subordinates into conformity.”

In her most recent work, Irons takes an autobiographical turn, referencing her own experiences growing up in an intentional community in the early 1980s, depicting figures not in the storybook styles of the Colonial era as in previous work, but in the fashions of her childhood.  Disillusionment is evident in these scenes, where women set fires and wire landmines, shoot targets, and hunt in packs.  These idyllic communities of well-intentioned land stewards disintegrate, and the freedom the land promises is exploited by human intervention.  In The Custom of the Country, a bucolic landscape is marred by the overwhelming intensity of a tie-dyed sky, representative of the human need for ornamentation at the cost of nature.  Yurts, tents and mobile homes are surrounded by trappings of domesticity, visually reinforced by Irons’ use of once-popular “Bargello” embroidery in garish colors as substitutes for natural land features.  In Parker Mountain, imitation bargello embroidery becomes a surrogate for the mountains and their lake reflection.

Hilary Irons’ “Sheetrock Mountain” could be the title of a lost folk-rock track, an anthem to slap-dash communes invading the pristine wildernesses.  It could also be the name of an intentional community itself, one of Irons’ hillside villages surrounded by river and woods, and filled with trigger-happy Bacchantes.  The figural action and the degradation of the natural world are two notes in a greater theme.  The artist states:  “The alternately peaceful and violent forms of landscape’s traditional varieties, the Picturesque and the Romantic Sublime, churn together into compound scenes, where women in a world emptied of men turn to martial bids for power as well as subtler forms of coercion in a kind of feminist dystopia.”

Hilary Irons studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Parsons Paris, the Art Institute of Boston and Parsons School of Design, where she earned her BFA.  Her works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions on the east coast, including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art Juried Biennial Exhibition this year.  She will begin graduate studies at Yale School of Art in the fall.