Courtesy of the artist
Jaclyn Conley, Coterie, 2012. Oil on canvas.
Jaclyn Conley
That thin line between animal and human has always been a temptation to story, from Ovid’s cow and Kafka’s insect to Orwell’s pigs, from Walt Disney and Chuck Jones to Art Spiegelman. Metamorphosis can be both punishment and gift, since we are as often charmed by the beastly as we are horrified.
This delicate and unsettling frame of identity is lushly rendered in Jaclyn Conley’s pictures, with their Baroque interiors as theaters for an ark’s worth of transformed creatures.
Courtesy of the artist
Jaclyn Conley, Soft Center, 2012, Oil on canvas.
With her gift for making paint into light, Conley has fashioned a series of bright mythologies. In them, the animals behave like shameless masqueraders, all at ease within human confines, turning domestication on its head.
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