Wild at heart: Clare Dunne at Phil Space
By Iris McLister Fitzpatrick for The Santa Fe New Mexican// Dec 2017
Before anyone could really call Santa Fe’s Second Street an “arts district,” Phil Space was quietly doing its thing in the area. Unabashedly funky and unique, it’s a true artist’s art gallery, run by photographer Jamie Hart, whose studio is just off the main exhibition room. “I started doing shows here with my photography students in the mid-’90s,” Hart said. “By 2009, we began working with artists in a way that came closer to traditional representational relationships.”
Now, after a nine-month hiatus, Hart’s back to showing local art at Phil Space. “I needed to take some time off to reevaluate the whole thing,” he explained. “We’ll re-open with a series of shows in 2018 with a new vision for how to be in relationship with artists and community.” But first, on Friday, Dec. 8, for one night only, the work of local artist Clare Dunne will be on display at the gallery. One hundred percent of all proceeds benefit WildEarth Guardians, which began in Santa Fe in 1989 to fight a logging project on Northern New Mexico’s Elk Mountain and maintains its original goal “to protect and restore the wildlife, wild places, wild rivers, and health of the American West.”
It might come as a surprise that artist Clare Dunne isn’t a product of the West at all, but was born and raised in England. She has, however, lived in New Mexico for 15 years, studying art first at New Mexico State University and then at Santa Fe Community College, where she became enamored with charcoal drawing. For this show, her second at Phil Space, Dunne switched gears, working exclusively with cut paper, an unusual medium that might sound crafty, but is instead cleanly contemporary.
“The images are different in terms of medium, but similar in terms of subject matter,” Dunne said. “A number of years ago, I made a small series of botanical papercuts, and I was curious to see if I could make successful papercuts of wildlife. From there, I became excited by the process.” Incising slivered shapes into thick paper, Dunne’s meticulously designed animals are minimal and stark, but warmed up by the familiarity and simple beauty of their subjects. Standing depicts a wolf, pictured in profile, whose body and fur contain hundreds of splintery cut-out forms. There isn’t a single outline or stroke, just shapes that comprise the animal’s body.
Animals were also the stars of Dunne’s 2014 show Feathers and Fur at Phil Space, but they were hyperrealistically and lovingly drawn. Subjects in this show have a more streamlined, graphic appeal, with a minimalistic sensibility that’s obviously unrelated to the painstaking precision of the myriad cuts. Instead, their sleekness comes from an economy of composition, wherein every incision is deliberately wrought. It’s a medium that depends just as much on negative space as it does on positive. “I began to understand the different properties of the papers I was using and the great potential of the medium,” Dunne said. “The natural limitations of the process force me to distill the contours down to the elemental qualities of the animal or bird.”
Dunne’s affinity for wildlife is immediately obvious. Vulture, for example, could only have been made by an animal lover. With its outspread, many-feathered wings, the bird’s elegance is conveyed in an effortless, uncomplicated way. In Owl, her feathered subject is treated with similar reverence. The creature is dramatically pictured from behind, slightly hunched and swooping downwards. “I have always valued my drawing practice but question how my art can have a broader, more practical impact,” Dunne said. “A simple solution is for the proceeds of any sales from the work to go to an organization I believe in. An unforeseen byproduct of this has been to loosen up my process, since the work is less about myself, opening it up to an unexpected playfulness.”
It makes sense that Phil Space’s return begins with a show that unites art and community in its purpose. The gallery’s unfussy and unpretentious means of showing art has created a vibe that extends to the neighborhood at large. “I like what Second Street has become,” said Hart. “It’s a community of dedicated creative workers.”