Reflecting on the Space of One’s Own Imagination

By Dominique Nahas
2011

     Glowing, radiant translucency permeates Amy C. Storey’s large works on paper completed this year, among them the color-filled Adieu Mon Amour (2011), The Cosmos and the Phoenix (2011) and the two black and while works A Platonic Year (2011) and Dream of the White Elephant (2011).   These artworks measuring 5 x 10 feet are each comprised of three sheets of paper laid end to end give off a slight suggestion of narratological sequentiality. Storey works with gouache but she has a painter’s deft touch and a watercolorist’s sensitivity to overlays and transparencies. The compositions and fluid interchanges of nuanced tonalities and colors, one might say, pertain to the artist’s susceptibilities.  Storey has dramatic impulses; she has an evident affinity to symmetry and connection on one hand while she seems fascinated by disruption, discord, and discrepancies on the other.  The artist also embraces oppositions: seriality, wholeness and commonality is inexorably subject to asymmetry, fragmentation and differences.  Maintaining equilibrium between these variables creates a sense of on-going vitality, a sensation that is the hallmark of Storey’s visual effects.      
    The artist’s interlinked sections in Adieu Mon Amour and the Cosmos and the Phoenix while seemingly under transition and subject to impending dissolution nevertheless have a strong holding power on the viewer.  Equally hypnotic are the undulating overall forms, akin to amoebic structures or perhaps sea algae swaying under water during a moonlit night, in A Platonic Year and Dream of the White Elephant.  In these works the artist reflects on singularities and differences that cohabitate in a reverie-filled cosmos whose spacing enraptures and intrigues equally. Importantly, Storey’s opulently sensual application of mark-making and nuanced compositional structuring makes her work visually arresting from near and far viewing positions. This dual quality gives the overall work a strongly charismatic public presence. Simultaneously there is an equally strongly intimate, auratic quality that dwells within each body of work as well.  
      Gustave Flaubert noted a commonly accepted truism of art: “You must not think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.” By contrast art historian Henri Focillon in La Vie des Formes [The Life of Forms] challenged the very cliché that feeling in art finds its measure only in and through the form that sustains it.  He proposes:  “ I do not say that form is the allegory or the symbol of feeling, but rather, its most innermost activity. Form activates feeling. Let us say that art not only clothes sensibility with a form, but that art also awakens form in sensibility.”
       I am bringing this up because an autonomous formal quality is an ingredient that gives Amy Storey’s art tremendous impact.  Her forms certainly seem to be extensions of the artist’s sensibilities yet they take on a self-directing life of their own. One gets the distinct sensation that these forms imply that they are internally generated rather than imposed exclusively from the outside, or directed by the artist’s feelings or ego. The plasticity of these forms seems to have their own inherent autonomic volition.  Storey paints them as if alive:  quivering, caught in the play of fixity and passage and oscillating between mobility and closure. 
        There is a tremulousness, for example, within the tripartite Adieu Mon Amour. In spite of the imposing size of the work its insistent physicality is tempered by sensations of fragility and porosity carried over into a ghostly punctured membrane and its antithesis a black entity that appears to hold it inexorably in place at the bottom right of the composition. Note that a good part of the rapturous if not sublime feelings we feel as we gaze on this composition is due because we feel that Storey pushes us as viewers to take into account the biologic drama and does so by insinuating that the generative organic involvement exceeds the frame of representation. We get the sensation that there is so much to see outside of the context of the field of depiction and that whatever may exist is due to an oscillation of forms that are in turn determined either by causality or chance. In Adieu Mon Amour a sense of contingency and of fleeting life pervades.
         The artist writes: “Finding an image is different than deliberately setting out to create an image, and in this sense my work is complete exploration.”  Amy C. Storey’s vision has produced faith in the reality of the invisible; in this sense her work is that of the inner eye, of the seer. Her work is that of revelation.