A brand-new arrival to the Vero art scene, artist Jill Kerwick (along with her fiancé, Arthur “Artie” Kontos) has lived in Vero Beach all of two months now. The studio in Kerwick’s John’s Island home, however, is already comfortably lived-in and production-ready.
A recent afternoon found the artist studying a group of art works she has pinned to the studio’s walls. With a solo show at the Visual Art Center in Summit, New Jersey, coming up in July, she needs to decide which of her archival pigment prints (a photo printing process) to show, and how large she should have them printed.
Although the artist’s digital images exist in her computer until she decides to print them, Kerwick does not think of her prints as photos, but rather as collages that have been assembled via Photoshop. Despite their photographic origins, the expressive power of Kerwick’s collages is derived from the tradition of narrative painting, with a surreal twist.
“I call this one ‘Masculine and Feminine,’” Kerwick says, indicating one of her latest works.
The picture’s setting looks like a dollhouse living room decorated by a mad child. The pattern of the flocked wallpaper looks too big for the velvet turquoise couch in front of it. Two females facing each other on the couch are engaged in earnest conversation. Their heads and hair are of painted china; their bodies, clad in suburban casualwear, are of flesh and blood.
A large painting behind these half-human beings presents yet another chimerical impossibility. It shows two chestnut racehorses in a pasture. One of them looks normal enough, but the other is composed of two equine hind ends joined together at the belly, each end complete with its own tail. The creature has no head, and appears completely at ease without one.
A recent work titled “Agape” (2014) is set against the painted backdrop of an early autumn landscape. On a grassy bank in the foreground, a china-headed ash blonde sits with a cute baby rabbit in her lap. On the grass next to her, another rabbit – a white, polar bear-sized one – is an unsettling presence.
“Man, Woman and Child” (2015) is an interior where a doll-woman in an armchair elicits the attention of a gargantuan baby sitting on the floor beside her. On the wall behind them, a gloomy painting of a man in armor adds more mystery to the scene. Is he the reason this odd couple have been brought together?
“That is what’s so much fun,” notes Kerwick. “The scale is all wrong.”
If Kerwick’s tableaux remind you of scenes from fantasy fiction or an Alfred Hitchcock movie, you are not far off.
The artist is fond of a storytelling device called a MacGuffin. Defined as a compelling object or concept that sets the motive for a story, the MacGuffin has no narrative importance in and of itself. Its value is created and shaped by the actions of the story’s characters in relation to it.
The movies contain many a notable MacGuffin. In “Citizen Kane,” the MacGuffin is a word: “rosebud.” It is a missing client in “The Thin Man,” and the color red in “Marnie” (Hitchcock, Kerwick notes, was a master of the MacGuffin). The important thing, Kerwick notes, is not to understand the why of the MacGuffin, but to experience the story, whether it be a film, a novel or one of her collages.
Kerwick’s MacGuffin is not found in any of the things she adds to her pictures. It is instead in the relative scale of the things that occupy her environments.
Kerwick says that “things happen” in her pictures because she builds them, in a manner of speaking, from the ground up. The persuasive power of photography takes over where she leaves off, lulling the viewer into accepting the improbable. That, Kerwick asserts, is because her invented worlds are “just real enough.”
As with a perfectly executed magic trick, the viewer may at the same time want, and not want, to know how it was done.
Kerwick, however, is not shy about revealing her methods.
The objects in her pictures were discovered (or created) by her specifically for use in the artworks. She photographs each component separately – the general setting or background, the human figures, the dolls’ heads and other details – and joins them seamlessly in her computer’s Photoshop program.
The ceramic heads that figure in the works are 1960s-era “lady head vases” that Kerwick began collecting about seven or eight years ago. The heads are the very image of mid-century chic, with their bouffant hairstyles, arched eyebrows and shiny red lips; some wear ceramic bows in their hair, and one sports a strand of faux pearls around her neck.
Kerwick was into scissors, paper and glue collages then. The lady heads came into play when she began to collage photos of the heads onto other photographed environments. The process gradually became more complex when she shot the heads in a “real” landscape, and then collaged photos of her own applicably costumed body into the picture.
“Then I decided I had to learn Photoshop,” she says.
The new level of veracity this brought to her art prompted Kerwick to start building her own “sets” for the goings-on of her imaginary world. For landscapes pictures, she used some of the canvases painted by her late father, Thomas Kerwick, a talented amateur in the Hudson River School style. Kerwick now paints the landscapes she wants for her backgrounds in a similar style, fronting them with squares of sod where the action of the story takes place. Her interiors are constructed like miniature stage sets, with fabric-covered walls and floors and scaled-down potted plants.
The varied talents Kerwick employs in her current body of work – painting, collage, photography, printmaking and set design – are a product of nature as well as nurture.
Her interest in art was inspired by the example of her father, who in addition to painting owned a convenience store in New Jersey (where Jill grew up and where she still calls “home” in the summer). The elder Kerwick was trained in art at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League in New York.
Jill Kerwick studied art at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, where she received a bachelor of fine arts degree in illustration and painting in 1978. After leaving school she “just fell into” a job as an art director in New York, an occupation she subsequently held for 15 years.
When graphic design became a matter of computer keystrokes, Kerwick went back to school at New York University for a master of fine arts in painting and printmaking. She graduated in 1995.
Since then she has devoted herself to her art, pursuing continuing education at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado and Vermont Studio Center.
Kerwick’s solo show at the Visual Art Center in Summit, New Jersey, runs from July 22 to Sept.11.
