Last year national attention was focused on Philadelphia artist Maurie Kerrigan when she was awarded the coveted AVA award, given to only ten artists across the country. There she was grinning from the font page of The New Art Examiner, shaking hands with Nancy Reagan while wearing her signature black basketball sneakers. The image lingers because it is the artist outwardly unaltered in her characteristic dress on the most august occasion. While most artists dream of such powerful recognition i t ‘ s not without some effect on the creative process. This show of Kerrigan’s new work at Jeffrey Fuller, her first show since the award, shows her to have weathered the new prominence, by becoming stronger, darker and more intense. Smoke Fire Ash, Kerrigan’s title for her new group of work, like all of the words Kerrigan uses in her pieces have double and triple meanings. This temporal sequence of first smelling smoke, seeing flames and then feeling ash, can metaphorically describe the process of creation or destruction. Art is the phoenix which rises from the ashes. Smoke Fire Ash, incidentally are the ingredients for the Japanese Anagana wood burning kiln, in which each has a chance to mark the pots
and effect the final surface design. Kerrigan’s earlier work was marked by light, bright, warm colors, an unusual mix of materials, and an ever-growing skill and sophistication of wood carving. They were attractive, appealing and endearing, and if you didn’t look too carefully, winsome.

But if you looked carefully, and looked for a while, there was always a political consciousness lurking not too far beneath the surface. This new work is as different from that, as night from day, and I use the cliche advisedly. This series of 29 objects is darker in color, tone and meaning. To reinforce this, Kerrigan prefers that you look at her show with the gallery lights at a minimum, wearing a special “United Mind Union” painted helmet with a flashlight attached, which illuminates sections of the works as you look at them. This is a brilliant conceit for controlling access enforcing viewers to consider jour work slowly, and take the time to look carefully. We usually feel in the dark about art anyway, don’t we? One uncanny thing
about this set-up for me that on Groundhog Day, the official opening of Kerrigan’s show, a day we
all take to looking for shadows seriously, I was in Mexico City talking to artist Milippe Arênberg, who was telling me about plans for his visitors upcoming opening during which, gallery lights were to be off and
were to be provided with flashlights to see the work. I think that it is on accident that Kerrigan and Arenberg, who don’t know each other, are political artists who think deeply about the dark hour of our world.

As I stood in the Kerrigan show, Iheard a special sound tape, she had prepared for her by WXPN’s Mary Armstrong, playing “Sweet Honey in the Rock,” and a song about nuclear war entitled “Believe I’ll Run On Ahead And See What The End Is Gonna Be,” which is very much a theme of most of the work in Kerrigan’s show.

Kerrigan is also a feminist, and this aspect of her thinking reveals itself in her choice of the leit motiv. Several pieces in her show, as well as the exhibition poster and button, show an image of a woman-house, a conceit which can be traced back to Louise Bourgeois and Miriam Shapiro to name just two predecessors who used, but by no means invented, this powerful form. Kerrigan makes it her own by having a rather androgynous woman, who wears basketball sneakers, and the house is on fire. Like the ladybug in the nursery rhyme, we are alerted to the present danger of conflagration in our world. For those of us who have come to expect a buoyancy, effervescence and wit in Kerrigan’s work, this show will come as a shock. The wit is there, but it is dark humor indeed. I couldn’t help thinking of the analogy of a beautiful woman who, because she’s not taken seriously enough becomes rather severe, almost purposely undermining her physical appearance, so that she will not be taken and treated in a superficial
manner. Kerrigan’s artful carving skills, for example, are here present in several pieces, but are covered
over by many, many layers of glossy and very dark toned enamel, so we are prevented from enjoying carving as in, for example, the earlier piece which is now in the collection of The Philadelphia Museum of Art called “Jonah and the Whale.” Her cut copper pieces are likewise coated with almost lacquer-like layers of very brooding pigment. But all is not sackcloth and ashes. The large “Wheel of Life” which is formed by a circle of rapacious, toothy fish which gobble each other’s bottoms, si a resplendent design statement, based on a form Kerrigan has often returned to, and the piece, “Any Old Time You Want To Come Home XXX Rosie,” seems to hold the door open for a renewing of life, if not love.

The show is a very rich one, and takes a long time to look at. I’m not going to get into the appearances in this work of the new folk technique, an old idea made new in Kerrigan’s work of reverse painting on glass and by her use of safety glass. This very provocative exhibition is on view at Jeffrey Fuller Fine Art, 2108 Spruce Street through the 12th of March.