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Gallagher's ghosts
Gallagher之魂
Art inspired by myth and stories
源于神话的艺术
ELLEN GALLAGHER was born in 1965 in Rhode Island, the daughter of an African-American father with ties to Cape Verde in West Africa and an American-Irish mother. Now she divides her time between New York and Rotterdam. Ms Gallagher mines sci-fi, marine biology and black history for her art, variously making use of cut-up paper, pencil, plasticine, printed matter, rubber, gold leaf and photogravure. It is out of this rich interbreeding of method and materials that her astonishing work arises.
ELLEN GALLAGHER，1965年出生于罗德岛，父亲是非洲裔美国人，曾居于西非佛得角，母亲则是爱尔兰裔美国人。如今她多往来于纽约和鹿特丹港市。Gallagher的艺术灵感多源于科幻、海洋生物学以及黑人历史。利用剪纸、铅笔、粘土、印刷品、橡胶、金箔、凹版印刷等各式各样的材料工具，她独创出了令人叹为观止的作品。
This summer two new Gallagher exhibitions will open, one on each side of the Atlantic. A substantial survey at Tate Modern in London will be followed by a 20-year retrospective at the New Museum in New York.
今夏在大西洋两岸将各举办一场Gallagher的新作展览会。伦敦泰特现代美术馆所做的大量探索研究将继续由纽约当代艺术馆以20年回顾展的名义进行。
The first room at the Tate Modern show has been covered with ruled writing paper, a reminder of the importance that the line and the grid play in Ms Gallagher's work and of the inspiration of minimalist artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt. This humble papering provides a formal background for her work and helps steer it away from pomposity. But there is much more to Ms Gallagher's work than linear scaffolding—much to be read into it and much to be resisted, especially easy clichés about race or gender.
泰特现代展览的第一间陈览室里挂满方格纸作品，可见Gallagher颇为青睐横格线条，并从Agnes Martin 、Sol LeWitt等极简抽象派艺术家那获得颇多的灵感。这种极简贴纸展现出匀称的布局，避免浮夸。但Gallagher的作品并不仅仅是组建线条，还有更多发人深省的隐藏讯息，类似于种族性别这种常谈之事。
Early works from the 1990s, such as “Untitled, 1992”, for instance, play with the red lips and white-ringed eyes that recall black and white minstrels. An abstract pattern emerges, then disembodied “golliwog” smiles. “Negroes Ask for German Colonies”takes its title from a phrase in an article that was written in 1919 by a Harlem radical, Hubert Harrison, and which Ms Gallagher cuts into paper. Above the words is a grid of 20 female wig models with black, white and brown faces. The wigs, one named “Innocence” and another “Coquette”, are made from elaborately cut white paper. Pink plasticine curls emerge from the models' eyes. It is exquisitely constructed and at the same time funny to behold, alluding to the rise of American black consciousness and poking at the covert racism of so much consumer advertising.
Gallagher 在其90年代的早期作品“Untitled, 1992”中，利用红唇与白环状眼眸的搭配唤起人们对纯粹的游吟诗人的回忆。先是抽象图案，再是出人意料的灵肉分离式的怪诞微笑。2002年的作品“Negroes Ask for German Colonies”得名于一篇文章中的短语，该文由Harlem radical, Hubert Harrison于1919年撰写。Gallagher将其刻于纸上。那是一组20位黑、白、棕面色的假发女郎方格图。名为“天真无邪”和“卖弄风情”的假发均由白色剪纸精心拼贴而成。女郎的双眸浮现出粉色的彩泥卷发。该作构思精巧，新潮逗趣，并意指美国黑人思潮运动的兴起，剑戳众多消费广告中暗涌的种族歧视。
The works Ms Gallagher calls the “Yellow paintings”—which include “Falls and Flips” from 2001 and “Double Natural” from the year after, as well as “Pomp-Bang”, which Ms Gallagher painted in 2003—take this theme further (detail pictured above). Each one is a monumental grid of 396 advertisements for wigs and other items, such as hair grease or skin-whitening cream, as well as illustrated articles from black magazines of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ebony, Our World, or Black Stars. Each face wears an elaborate, fantastical yellow plasticine wig. What could be dry social history becomes exuberant art-making.
Gallagher的“Yellow paintings”系列—包括2001年的“Falls and Flips”、2002年的“Double Natural”和2003年的“Pomp-Bang”—继续深入该种族的主题。每一格都是对396支假发、发胶、美白面霜等产品广告的纪念，是对五六十年代Ebony，Our World，或Black Stars等黑人杂志中插图的致敬。每一张面孔都戴着梦幻而精致的金色彩泥假发。谁能想到枯燥的社会史也能成为生机勃勃的艺术作品呢。
Ms Gallagher often folds historical characters into her work, including “Peg Leg” Bates, a one-legged tap dancer, and Eunice Rivers, a nurse who was implicated in the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment carried out on black Alabamans between 1932 and 1972. At the age of 20, sponsored by the Sea Education Association, Ms Gallagher spent some time aboard an oceanographic research vessel collecting, studying and drawing pteropods—microscopic wing-footed snails. This experience has combined with her interest in the myth of Drexciya, an underwater country peopled with the unborn babies of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard mid-Atlantic. It has generated an extraordinary body of work collectively entitled “Watery Ecstatic”. Detailed drawing, intricate paper cutting, and dreamy watery colour, together create a universe of strange sea creatures. They suggest an imagination gripped equally by precision and fluidity, by science and poetry, and a mind that feeds on the beauty of nature while being haunted at the same time by the many layers of human history.
Gallagher常在其作品中融入一些历史人物，包括“Peg Leg” Bates，一位独腿踢踏舞者；1932年至1972年，以阿拉巴马州的黑人为对象进行了臭名昭著的塔斯基吉梅毒实验，名为Eunice Rivers的护士卷入其中。通过海教协会的赞助，Gallagher 20岁时得以在海外学习海洋学，集舰，研究绘制翼足目动物—微小的翼足蜗牛。这一经历更是和她感兴趣的水城Drexciya，一群被推下甲板的怀有身孕的非洲奴隶居住在大西洋中央的传说，水乳交融。由此诞生了一组名为“Watery Ecstatic”的非凡佳作。细致入微的刻画，错综复杂的拼剪，梦幻的水彩色，共同造就了海洋生物的奇幻世界。精细性与流动性、科学性与诗意同时抓住人们的想象力，思绪浸食自然之美的同时又被人类历史的复杂多样困扰着。
“Bird in Hand”, the great 2006 work on paper that is owned by the Tate, also draws on these preoccupations, generating out of myth and marine biology the startling figure of a one-legged pirate standing at the bottom of the ocean. His hair floats upwards in the water in a baroque confection of seaweed made from card and paper, all painstakingly cut by hand. His stump has sprouted seaweed. His black face is occluded by a white mask. This is a work that indulges in patterned beauty even as it freezes the spirit.
2006年的“Bird in Hand”，一幅所有权归泰特美术馆的杰作，同样利用这些勾魂摄魄的元素刻画出传奇的海洋生物、出人意料的人物形象，一个站在海底的独腿海盗。他的头发，以一团精细的巴洛克式纸片海藻的姿态漂浮在水面。这全是Gallagher煞费苦心的手工拼贴。他的假肢也萌生出一撮撮水藻。白色面具紧紧咬合他黑色的面孔。即使寒从心起这也是一幅令人沉溺于精美纹路的作品。
Many of the works exhibited, including the films she has made with her longtime collaborator, Edgar Cleijne, and the double-sided paintings called “Morphia”, reveal a determination to express complexity through an elaborate process of making. Canvasses are built up in collaged layers. Mysterious, balletic animations are projected alongside archival film that has been doctored to produce strange new narratives. The paper Ms Gallagher uses is meticulously drawn on, painted, cut, stuck, pierced, both on the front and the back, and then hung in glass boxes. Her works are dense with thought, but thought transformed by intensive creative workmanship into something rich and strange.
被展出的众多作品中，还有她与长期合作伙伴Edgar Cleijne共同拍摄的影片，及双面画作“Morphia”，这幅作品力图通过精巧错综的创作过程揭露其复杂性。多层抽象拼贴的效果极具说服力。神秘莫测的芭蕾舞式动画制作与剪辑过的档案电影共同创造出了新异的故事。Gallagher所选纸张的正反面均经过精心绘制、裁剪、拼接，最后才挂上玻璃画框。她的作品寓意繁多，通过别出心裁的手工将那些思想付诸于天马行空的画作。
“Ellen Gallagher: AxME” is at Tate Modern in London until September 1st. It will travel to the Sara Hildén Art Museum in Tampere, Finland, in the autumn and to the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany, in 2014. “Don't Axe Me” will be at the New Museum in New York from June 19th until September 15th.
“Ellen Gallaghe：AxME正于伦敦泰特现代美术馆展出，9月1日截止。秋季展将在芬兰坦佩雷的Sara Hildén 美术馆举办。2014年在德国慕尼黑的Haus der Kunst展出。“Don't Axe Me”将于六月19日至9月15日在纽约New Museum展出。
