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Cindy Tower at the Armour Meatpacking Plant. Photograph by Katherine Bish.
Tonight, the Sheldon Art Galleries are hosting an opening reception for Cindy Tower's Riding the Rubble Down from 5-7 in the Kranzberg Gallery. This time last year, I was working on the piece I wrote about Cindy for the magazine, which was published April 2008. If you drove to Cape Girardeau last year to see Cindy's Workplace Series show at the Crisp Museum, you know how powerful her work is. If you've not seen her paintings, they're huge, technically superb but soulful, and they just get you in the solar plexus when you stand in front of them; sorta like, at least for me, seeing Jackson Pollack's paintings in person (as opposed to art books, where they look like splatters and splotches) or standing in front of the Holy Ghost Panel in Horseshoe Canyon. She paints in situ, usually inside of collapsing factories like the meatpacking plant over in National City, Ill. Here's a snippet from the Sheldon's description of the show:
"Cindy Tower’s richly wrought canvases offer new meaning, vigor and intensity to the classic tradition of plein air painting. Trespassing on abandoned sites of 19th- and early 20th-century technological innovation, Tower produces works that are both self-portraits and metaphors for the state of the world and the human condition. The exhibition, which encompasses a range of work from 2005 to 2008, shows a progression in her handling of paint from her earlier grand-scale works that document every detail of the environment to her recent, more loosely-applied, drippy and disintegrating renderings of the scene.
The exhibition, which encompasses fifteen paintings completed between 2005 to 2008 while she was in St. Louis, shows a progression in her handling of paint from her earlier grand-scale works that document every detail of the environment to her recent, more loosely-applied, drippy and disintegrating renderings. This shift marks both the artist’sneed for continual experimentation and renewal in her vision but also illuminates her view of the world as it has changed since 9/11. The title of the exhibition, Riding the Rubble Down, areference to the story of one 9/11 survivor, is an apt description for what Tower does in her painting as she fixes the disintegrating detritus of the industrial revolution as it falls, sometimes literally, down around her. The works depict a lost world since much of what she has painted no longer exists, having been carried away by legal and illegal scrappers. 'Old Master' paintings for the 21st century, Tower’s works carry age-old allegories yet also present to us the issues of today’s world."
Earlier this week, I got an email from Cindy indicating this would be her last show in St. Louis; she is moving away, from what I can discern. (This is where I should be quoting Ginsberg's lines from Howl about how Moloch and how America devours its young, etc. The fact that Cindy wasn't receiving lots of major shows, or getting vigorous support and/or recognition from much of the art scene here, embarasses the hell out of me. I love St. Louis, but sometimes its self-defeating behavior just boggles the mind.) My wistful feeling about that news was compounded by this post from Ecology of Absence, where Michael Allen describes taking a group of schoolchildren over to East St. Louis to see the stockyards, which Cindy chronicled in several paintings, before they're torn down. But all cycles come to an end, of course. This country is currently in the midst of the mother of all winding-down cycles, and Cindy's paintings of collapsing factories, emptied out due to globalization and outsourced labor, are powerful depictions of that process, not just literally, but metaphorically.
Malcolm Gay, who's now part of our crew, but was on the RFT's staff last year, wrote about Cindy as well, and put together this video documentary; you can download, or order, the exhibition book through Bruno David Gallery. The show is on view through May 9. The Sheldon is located at 3648 Washington, in Grand Center. For more information, call them at 314-533-9900. --Stefene Russell
