Allison Sommers: Pond Song
Arch Enemy Arts
109 Arch St.
Philadelphia
Showing June 6th - July 6th
Seen June 11
I’m not the only one who thinks Princess Fiona looks sexier as an ogre than as a girl. (Reddit says so, too.)
My cinematic theory as to why is this: Swamp life brings out the best in people.
The flourishing resonance of the swamp — the transitional habitat where water and land meet — is the subject of “Pond Song,” artist Allison Sommer’s latest show at Arch Enemies Gallery.
Through paintings and sketches of murky waters with naked creatures outstretched in their wakes, Sommer illustrates her personal and chronic struggles with physical health as well as the general resiliency of human spirit.
In Sommer’s world, bodies blend like whirlpools of flesh into the waters around them. Lily pads appear as membranous diagrams of human cells while the breasts and bare skin of swamp people resemble colonies of algae. Pink-tipped fingers shoot out of the weeds like blossoming flowers; tendrils of hair twine off the scalp like seaweed. We’re definitely not in the Bahamas, looking at these images; Sommer's ecosystems are sheer but impenetrable, a barrage of dense and impossible-to-articulate feelings rather than transparent conclusions.
Whereas sandy beaches are a common outlet for conventional beauty — think supermodels in Sports Illustrated bikinis — the swamp reveals the deeper allure of humanity’s truest self. The chamber of human consciousness could be described as the wild west of wetlands; it’s an ever-evolving breeding ground of liquid perceptions, both fixed and transient.
The swamp is grotesque in its muddy mugginess and mesmerizing in its lush abundance. Sommers captures this duality by filling her landscapes with guts, dismembered body parts and classical female forms; she is alluding both to humanity's historic obsession with simple, womanly curves and to our strange repulsion towards the equally stunning intestines and organs that lie beneath our skin. The parts that we shy away from seeing are the things that give us life; our insides are actually colorful, intricate, even gorgeous at a glance. This is true, at least, in Sommers paintings; uncanny blobs of blood, mucus and flesh are drenched in vibrantly complimentary colors, raspberry and chartreuse. Rain droplets — or, maybe, tears — adorn the foreground like dulled rhinestones.
Sommers made these artworks while recovering from surgery for endometriosis and fibromyalgia. Through her leaky, psychedelic images, she successfully articulates that the slow glamor of life stems not from superficial sleekness, but from the vibrant anguish of recycled recovery.
I guess Mike Myers said all of this but more succinctly when DreamWorks hired him to voice the line, “Ogres are like onions.” Maybe humans are more like ogres than we like to admit; we are a fictional and fantastical species in that we live as much in our heads as we do in our bodies. We are the intersection of land and water, of fluids and solids.
If humanity online is a tsunami of falsity, lived experience is a wetland of opacity. The fact that America has lost nearly 50 percent of our wetlands — primarily due to overdevelopment and agriculture — since the late 18th century sharpens the analogy. Only as we’ve erased seemingly insignificant puddles of water has their relevance to protecting diverse environments become increasingly clear.
Shrek might not seem like a bad role model because of his poor emotional regulation skills, but he succeeds where it counts; he’s not some princess trapped in a sterile castle, but the guy who shows Fiona how to start living. It all starts and ends in the swamp.
