Show July/August


DEERPARK
photography and painting

by Monique Crine


With Deerpark we encounter a selection of images with the desultory quality of snapshots, each resembling those family photographs we remember to forget by boxing away in our closets (or by “saving” them on our external hard drives). Monique Crine has decided to paint some while others are presented as photographic prints, and there appears to be no logic as to what might compel their maker to translate one into oil while retaining the photographic indexicality of another. So why should Crine make replicas from this selection of photographic sources, which her paintings do with a minimum of difference in surface fracture, if not to produce from the secularizing photograph the semblance of the auratic icon in paint?

Crine's attention to likeness in her paintings suggest this iconization as do the titles that correspond to the given names of the individuals; each image centers its subject with the effect of luring the viewer into speculations that figure's identity and psychic state. But do Crine's photographic paintings merely appeal to our curiosity about their subject matter? Are there not some excesses that destabilize, consciously or unconsciously, this ability of painting to present its subject?



DEERPARK | Monique Crine, July 2010

  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010
  • Deerpark | Monique Crine, July 2010



The modern American image of Judeo-Christianity, of which the nuclear family was one representation, has been revealed to be what it was from the time of its alliance with late-capitalism, an idolatry of the image itself. Framing the subjects in Crine's images, who each seem formally as well as psychically constricted within the pictures, are the encrustations of this bankrupt fantasy of the American good life: All-Clad cookware, wall-to-wall carpeting, Laura Ashley wallpaper, a lineup of skulls on the t-shirt of a guileless boy on a sunny afternoon spent in suburban leisure. All make for good copy.



Crine holds an MFA from Cornell University, and a BA from San Francisco State University. This is her first solo show with the gallery.

by Anthony Graves

DEERPARK | Monique Crine, July 2010


DEERPARK | Monique Crine, July 2010