Fairy Tales : Paintings by Joy Every
CURATOR'S STATEMENT

In one of Joy Every’s recent paintings, “Follow the North Star,” a crow perches on a dark peak overlooking a snowy road, along which a solitary gray shadow falls, a vaguely human shape.  In the black sky, four stars of the Little Dipper, whose last star is the North Star, shine above the road’s vanishing point.  That’s it.  Like an unusually demanding dream, her narrative is both plain and unnervingly symbolic.  What can it mean?  Both warning and menace may be present, in the watching crow and the shadow following behind – and what we’re directed toward is upward, and onward into unrevealed conditions, down the snowy road.

Joy Every’s professional life as a creative director of animation projects has set her standard for a storyline very high.  Great storylines draw upon symbolic confluences.  In painting, the most engaging problem is in creating, in a single static image, the primal or dramatic thrust of significant ideas or experiences.  Sometimes those experiences are radically symbolic, so that only symbols will express It/Them.

What is continually new in each work is the narrative frame that draws her forms forward.  The styles of her titles serve as brief introductions to the scripts, in effect:  “Road To Anywhere”– a black line curving through the mountains, “Forbidden Fruit – a mysterious fire in a valley below a leafless white tree, or “Reston Creek.” – a flow of abstract energy in a winterscape. 

Many of her rounded, flowing shapes appear as organic or naturalistic, and she seems to feel free to move between abstract and representational forms, as Arthur Dove and Charles Burchfield did in the 1930’s when American art accepted abstraction specifically as it drew on nature.  But Burchfield’s work was intended to depict his florid and barren upstate New York, and Dove was committed to abstracting the sounds and shapes of coastal New England. As much as she may draw upon her life in Utah and Virginia for some of her “sets,” Joy Every is first illustrating a dreamscape, so her imagination is primary – making each painting a specific universe with its own secret moral, like a fable.  

“Three Sisters” pictures another road, in a forest bounded on the right by grey “rocks.”  Three trees across the road are in white blossom, below other older trees (one of whom manages a few blossoms), and in the foreground, the symbols really take over:  three blue botanical forms are cross-sections of a “rock,” followed by two tent-like yellow shapes with black interiors, and a rounded blue “flame.”  A series of small white vertical forms await, farther down the road. 

What’s happening?  Like a Tarot card, the meanings are designed to be multiple and singular, all at once.  Something intuitively determined has happened, that much we know. Each narrative is open, a set of clues and suggestions that could be found in a children’s book or on the walls of a cave. And we’re invited to investigate this other world.

J.W. Mahoney

J.W. Mahoney is an artist, writer and curator based in Virginia.  He has exhibited his work in the United States for over 25 years, is an active independent curator, and writes for numerous publications including Art in America, ArtNews, and Art Papers.  He is an educator at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and was a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden for 30 years.