Central Park is pleased to present Sun Shines, paintings by Los Angeles native Jane Parshall and wall-relief sculpture by New Orleans-based artist and sign-maker Joshua Edward Bennett. Sun Shines closes the gallery’s 2019 season.
Jane Parshall’s paintings are containers for mark-making. The marks often seem impulsive. And while they’re made quickly, there can also be generous lapses in time before subsequent marks are made on the same surface. These delays are the result of reflection, impasse, or a refusal to adopt a formula for how to proceed to the next mark. And there are certain preoccupations: flatness versus depth, paintings as stand-ins for windows or walls, marks as marks versus the mark as descriptor, the desire to a color in one painting elsewhere in the room.
Themes have emerged as the artist’s practice has evolved. Two of the paintings on view, Open Window #2 (1A) and 702, contain gestural renderings of a wallpaper pattern Parshall began painting in 2007. While the earlier paintings of this pattern were more literal, those in the exhibition bear little resemblance to the actual wallpaper that decorates her parents’ apartment in New York City. In the style of 18th century French or British decorative arts, the wallpaper depicts a romantic Orientalist scene of a man seated under a canopy of vegetation. It was chosen for the apartment by a friend of the artist's family, interior decorator Justine Cushing, the granddaughter of the painter Howard Gardiner Cushing. The junior Cushing’s decorative style is an extension of her grandfather’s paintings, and recalls the vestiges of the New York class system in Edith Wharton novels or Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan.
She chose chintz matching the wallpaper for the curtains, dust-ruffles, lamp shades, and chairs, and in addition, placed enlarged and framed photographs of her grandfather’s paintings in each room. Interiors, of course, are more than architecture or decor; they are the life lived there. While Cushing extends her Grandfather’s world into three-dimensional space, Parshall reverts the experience of those spaces back into the flatness of painting.