San Francisco-based artist Tamera Avery’s larger-than-life paintings on view at the Morris Graves Museum of Art through March 9 feature an idiosyncratic cast of characters, with every piece offering figurative representations that range between the whimsical, absurd, nihilistic and fantastic. The exhibition statement cites Avery’s optimistic appreciation for young folks as emerging champions of change, generating a particular inspiration from their resourcefulness in the increasingly precarious and adverse trajectories of possible futures. Some pieces are vignettes offering dispatches from perilous timelines, while others bear hybrid forms that are non-human, post-human or even more-than-human. There are 14 works, including eight large-scale and six smaller pieces. Throughout, Avery’s technical prowess is clear as she balances fuzzy yet somehow equally sharp brushstrokes across large-scale canvases.
The presented protagonists are found in myriad, otherworldly — or rather, nearly unrecognizable versions of our world — settings and scenes: in an abandoned, overgrown bumper car lot; a glacier; a snow plain; a nuclear fallout bunker; and a lush, mossy forest grove. The exhibition’s title Threshold suggests a precipice that has been edged, straddled and crossed over. It is this beyond-point of the threshold from which we glimpse Avery’s subjects as they navigate the clear uncertainties and anxieties of wayward tomorrows. However, only two of the works concretely anchor themselves on the other side of these dystopic paths through the threshold as an overgrown bumper car lot and a nuclear bunker face off from opposing walls of the William Thonson Gallery. In each of these pieces, respectively titled “Amusement Park” (2019) and “Common Ground” (2021), we see gothic figures standing still — as if unsuspectingly caught by our gaze — performing what appear to be rituals of joy and celebration. But the charge of these two pieces indicates the failure of these rituals to yield comfort, instead positioning these masked figures as ominous spectres with foreboding warnings of the future.
This tension between optimism and anxiety carries throughout Avery’s other pieces as the driving force of her exhibition. On the east and west walls of the gallery, two separate clusters of three small paintings feature studio-esque portraits of figures adorned with decorative headpieces. The artist’s background in fashion is most apparent here but shines brightest in the avant-garde renderings of her larger scenes. Unfortunately, these clusters of smaller pieces seem like afterthought bookends, perhaps unnecessarily included out of an impulse to infill the museum’s largest gallery.
Elsewhere, the focal piece “Evergreen” pictures a young female figure draped in a green pashmina with a cord or yarn wrapped around her head as she walks barefoot through a beautiful, mossy forest. While this piece shares the same sense of whimsy as its counterparts, “Evergreen” does not echo the neighboring fantastic elements, instead depicting a person easily mistaken for an updated Humboldt Honey walking through the Arcata Community Forest.
One of my favorite ghosts, the late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, makes an appearance in the footnotes of the exhibition’s takeaway materials as the artist cites his theoretical framework of “disidentification”: a way of coping within a dominant culture by rejecting and challenging expectations in the way we perform our cultural identities. With Avery’s reference to Muñoz in mind, we are better equipped to understand the slippage between reality and fantasy in her paintings and the sometimes more-than-human representational forms as youthful, cautionary rejections of an inherited world headed toward political, socioeconomic and environmental collapse. Throughout Threshold, we are presented with vestiges of utopias and dystopias. Avery’s use of queer theory frames the exhibition as a collection of sociopolitical works and not simply an aesthetic exercise into the absurd.
These are dizzying times and these are also dizzying paintings. The hints of possibility and interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar in these otherwise impossible pieces make this work unsettling. Perhaps Avery’s gift to her viewers is the reassurance that we are not the only ones unable to make sense of what to do next and experiencing newfound uncertainties in gauging our surroundings. Like pulling a loose thread that unexpectedly unravels, Threshold is an exhibition that reminds us of fraying places worthy of repair.
Tamera Avery’s Threshold is on view through March 9 in the William Thonson Gallery of the Morris Graves Museum of Art (636 F Street, Eureka), noon to 5 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday.
Alexander Rondeau (he/him) is a Canadian PhD student focusing on queer rural art. He holds an MFA in art criticism and curatorial practice, and now lives in Arcata.
This article appears in ‘Breathing Room’.
The artists name is misspelled throughout your article.