John Fesken’s ‘Ehulleck Tragedies’ Brings The Doctor to 58 Gallery
By Irene Borngraeber • Aug 12th, 2009 • Category: Arts, Featured
All photos: Mark T Townsend
John Fesken’s “Ehulleck Tragedies: Parvulus Ressurection” at 58 Gallery is a fairy tale: a dark, tortured epic of loss and desperation — but a fairy tale all the same. The installation currently on view is divided into three visually distinct parts that form the basis of an overarching storyline the artist has been expanding on for years.
Fesken, a Jersey City native who now lives in Georgia, has been working with the character of the Doctor (who looks a little like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) for many years now.
He describes the Doctor as a recurring, ever-evolving persona: “The Doctor’s always up to something. I started representing him as a kid with a bag over his head because … his father [another doctor] couldn’t stand to look at him… He has a fascinating story.” And it’s growing.
Part one in this show, “Beneath the Pink Moon,” a dialogue between the grief-stricken Doctor obsessed with trying to save his wife’s life (no matter what the cost) and an angel attempting to stop him from committing terrible acts, is reverse-painted on sheets of glass. Though they are brightly colored, graphic works, these pieces lack the crisp lines characteristic of traditional contour painting. The colors appear to bleed into one another, forming ripples and waves that evoke the Doctor’s own instability, passion and borderline madness. The backwards sentences scratched into the paint reveal the extent of the Doctor’s conversation with the angel — the fact that we can’t really read them highlights the futility and ultimate failure of the angel’s plea.
Part two, “Parvulus Ressurection,” a series of detailed, almost scientific drawings on paper, chronicles the Doctor’s experiments on children in a search for what will keep his wife alive. As he grows more and more obsessed with his increasingly disturbing mission (extracting the souls of these unfortunates), each new “procedure” seems justified, and he finally succeeds.
Part three, “To Eat the Love From A Good Man’s Heart,” takes us through the aftermath of these experiments. Here Fesken again shifts mediums, creating shadow-boxes peopled by miniature dolls adapted from found objects. These children, all victims of the Doctor’s experiments, become predators themselves — hunting down “good men” and devouring their hearts so they can momentarily regain the ability to love. The vignettes, constructed from used pieces of timer and set in a dark forest, are solitary, tragic portraits of the children and what remains of their prey.
Fairy tales themselves are ultimately about boiling down moral truth to its compact (and sometimes deceptively simplistic) essence — that’s what makes them so powerful. We’ve grown distant from our historic fables, but Fesken, in putting us face to face with a modern villain and his “offspring,” is playing off an oral heritage that still has the power to capture the human spirit. Yes this installation is escapist and yes it’s romanticized, but in a way that remains oddly poignant — and somehow truthful.
The Doctor and his cast of creepy characters will be showing at 58 Gallery until Aug. 29.
Ehulleck Tragedies: Parvulus Ressurection
Eating the love from a good man’s heart while standing beneath a pink moon
By John W. Fesken
58 Gallery
58 Coles St.
Friday 12-7, Saturday 12-5; or by appointment
Until Aug. 29
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Irene Borngraeber is an artist, art historian, and writer. She has worked in museums in the U.S. and abroad and currently covers the New York art scene for ArtVoices magazine.
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