Inez Storer

by Amber Whiteside

Artweek, 35 no1 18-19 F 2004

Occupying the intimate gallery at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, Encore Narratives comprises just fourteen of Inez Storer's most recent paintings. The exhibition is part of a collaborative effort with Santa Clara University's de Saisset Museum and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art to showcase Storer's four decades of artistic production and instruction in the Bay Area. Because Storer's work has changed only subtly in recent years, the thorough, cross-institutional investigation is indispensable. Such subtlety could too easily be interpreted as stagnation rather than sophistication. Viewing Encore Narratives in this larger context, it becomes clear that the many strains of symbols and stories that Storer has developed over the years have come to fruition, overlapping and exploding in their most dynamic display yet.

Storer has long talked about her work as a gathering and negotiating of collective histories. Informed by the amalgam of fiction and facts in her own personal history--her family's concealed German-Jewish heritage, her father's work as a Hollywood movie set designer, her husband's royal Russian lineage--Storer's work consistently involves a process of assemblage. Recurring characters and patterns--primarily painted, with details of collage and text--are rendered without regard for dimension or perspective. Storer's subjects--boats, birds, elephants, magicians, etc.--and their flat suspension in space imparts a whimsicality and childishness to her work that has, in the past, risked evading critical credibility. Similar, is her link to folk art--Storer often decorates the borders of her canvas with vines of roses and strawberries suggestive of kitchen wallpaper and thus too easy to look at (albeit deceptively so).

While maintaining elements of the fantastical and folksy, in her newer work Storer raises the stakes, adding to her compositions more layers of paint and collage, more cryptic text which imbue each piece with uncertainty and complication. Symbols that have consistently appeared in her paintings have been transformed and inverted. It could be said that Storer's work has for many years functioned as a deck of tarot cards or a shaman's altar--a set of symbols that resound in the greater collective consciousness. But the new work in Encore Narratives reminds us that the meaning of such symbols is determined by their ever-shifting composition.

In Noah's Arc (2003), which Storer presents as a response to 9/11, a crudely outlined boat straddles the smudgy background of fiery oranges and stormy grays. A large profile of a human head, painted a dark blue with a vacant white hole for an eye, lingers left of the boat. The following proclamation, written in red paint, emits from the dismembered head: "After many wars and other disputes, there was a great flood. A man named Noah built an Ark. He filled it with history and beauty." Small disjunctive images--a baby doll head, a rooster, a bouquet of roses, a sequence of Hindu elephants, to name just a few--surround the exterior of the boat. These images, most of which are recognizable from Storer's earlier work, don't interact with each other or the rest of the painting. Whether pasted or painted, they are deliberately fragmented. Coming out of the upper left corner is an airplane, which, until 9/11, easily conjured freedom and escape, has since become an ominous threat. It is made clear that no symbol can ever be static. Meanings constantly change and evolve. Even the proverbial ark is not safe from danger and subsequent re-definition.

In Claude and Stella (2003), gender roles and romantic love are also a shifty set of symbols and meanings. The titular figures sit beside each other, but distinctly separate, on a bright orange couch in a teal-toned room with a checkered floor. Above them hangs a black and white photo from an old movie in which a man and woman lean in close to one another. In direct contrast, Claude and Stella do not even face each other. Claude looks straight ahead resolutely; Stella eyes him suspiciously. The idealized love in the frame is a fiction--enacted by costumes and characters, but somehow it takes on a meaning that threatens the real relationship between Claude and Stella.

Encore Narratives is an impressive body of new work from Storer, but not because it is a major departure from her extensive repertoire as her style, themes and casts of characters have predominantly remained the same. Rather, what's impressive is that she takes precisely such familiarity and turns it on its head. By re-arranging her symbols and re-entering them into a complex network of narratives, Storer allows for--in fact, demands--multiple and conflicted meanings.

Amber Whiteside is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.

Inez Storer: Encore Narratives closes March 7 at the Montalvo Gallery, 15400 Montalvo Rd., Saratoga.