Art Lies, Volume 52, Fall 2006 Page: 86
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Joey Fauerso: Wide Open Wide
Women & Their Work
Marie-Adele Moniot
Known for her plush, hyperrealistic paintings, San
Antonio-based Joey Fauerso is a skilled and per-
ceptive observer of the moments "in between," evi-
denced in the shifting expressions of her human and
animal subjects. For Wide Open Wide, Fauerso's
most recent experiment with a new medium-dig-
ital animation-she focuses the same intense, tele-
scopic inquiry on the landscape of New Mexico,
and her take on the southwestern landscape as
subject is anything but static. It is a constantly
changing entity shifting in color, condition and
vibrancy. The element of time is absolutely essen-
tial to expressing this transformation. And cap-
turing this on paper cannot fully represent an
environment perpetually in flux. As a logical result,
Fauerso turns to the time-based medium of anima-
tion to realize her project.
Inspired by the alien landscape of Roswell
(where Fauerso recently participated in a year-
long residency program), Wide Open Wide is an
ode to the vast skyscape of the region. In addition
to this animation, her lovely exhibition at Women
& Their Work includes several series of paintings,
each a component part of the video. Flock 1-5, a
series of watercolors, features small, stark depic-
tions of birds in flight. Their patterned movement
is striking against the gallery's stark white walls,
which serve as a suitable stage for a winged per-
formance. At the Edge of Black Canyon (3) creates
a different sort of backdrop. A rich watercolor, the
painting depicts a rolling blue map-part topog-
raphy, part astronomy-of the place where land
meets sky. Clouds in the painting's upper quadrant
create a thick valley where birds cluster in flight.
In the gallery's main room, Fauerso displays
Open 5-14, ten deep-blue nightscapes of variously
sized galaxies. These watercolors look like picture
windows through which the sky shifts in grada-
tions of color. Here, each painting captures a phase
in the sky's nightly evolution--its life cycle. Fauerso
achieves a similarly cyclical result with Tommy, a
group of more than 300 oil and acrylic paintings
that cover the gallery's large western wall, each
a snapshot of her subject, Tommy McCutchon.
Fauerso originally recorded Tommy screaming on
camera and subsequently rendered each frame in
paint on paper. The result is a microscopic study
in human expression, every subtle shift separated
from the whole. With Tommy, Fauerso highlights
in paint the moments we normally wouldn't seeLr
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# .Joey Fauerso, Tommy, 2006
Oil and acrylic on paper
25 of series of 324
81/2 x 11 inches each
in a video-shy smiles and quirks lost in hun-
dredths of a second.
Fauerso's video is organized into three parts.
The order of the narrative is irrelevant, however,
because it is ultimately a circular read. In one sec-
tion, she animates the night sky with the water-
colors of Open 5-14. The work ebbs and flows,
chronicling shifting perception to a terribly sad
melody. Another section features the aforemen-
tioned birds as they move in a cylindrical shape
to the beat of a drum. The birds mimic each other
and the near perfect acrobatics of real birds in
migratory formation. The animation's third part is
Tommy's extended scream, his open mouth reveal-
ing a midnight-blue skyscape-one that eventually
engulfs him and the entire screen. It's a disturbing
image in this incarnation, abetted by the desperate
soundtrack Fauerso attaches to it, but it's also a fit-
ting counterpoint to her silent painted images.
By using animation instead of merely exhibit-
ing work in two dimensions, Fauerso creates some-mr "
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~F~Joey Fauerso, Flock 1-5, 2006
Video projection
Dimensions variable
thing new. She unveils something we never see:
the space between expression and mood. Fauerso's
inquiries move beyond the easy snapshot, captur-
ing what exists between the right now and the
right then. Movement and sound are essential to
this, serving as rhythmic support. In the end, a
mournful frustration and reverence infuses the
work. It's as if Tommy is shouting about the prefig-
ured loss of a perfect landscape, one surely found
only in dreams.86 ARTL!ES Fall 2006
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Bryant, John & Gupta, Anjali. Art Lies, Volume 52, Fall 2006, periodical, 2006; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228017/m1/88/: accessed March 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .