Artist Spotlight

Lynn Nafey and the Centrality of Time

Isabella Hillebrand

Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK

Time — hours, days, weeks, months — can be just as integral as any material or technique when making art. For Lynn Nafey (b. 1961), who describes herself as “always making art,” time is an essential element in the production of work. Her artistic evolution is diverse in style and form, and, after a more commercially-oriented career, she is now focused on the creation of art for herself. By exploring new themes, Nafey broaches topics of self-discovery, personal experience, and issues of gender and politics through dreamy images of life-like beings, the use of veiled symbols, and constructions of striking depth. Nafey works with sculpture, caricature, and even puppetry to forge her mixed-media assemblages. By using Dura-lar, a polyester film that seamlessly blends her own hand work and digital creations, Nafey creates art that seems to feed onto itself, yielding hazy compositions of color, uncertain depth, and clouded space. She begins with her surface, a wooden plank, and then layers the fragments of the piece together: paper, pigment transfers, gouache, and so much more. Nafey pulls some layers to the foreground while pushing some behind the waxy Dura-lar, burying shapes and brush marks, assembling the building blocks of her final configuration. She interposes line drawings and symbols, often created digitally, throughout the composition. The development of her pieces is thus an endless play wherein wonder and frenzy rev the engine; then her observant mind hits the brakes, letting the work evolve by slowing down and giving it room to grow on its own. By taking her time, Nafey draws, erases, and works the surface, creating a fluctuating flow in her three-dimensional collage.

Nafey’s “Blue Lies” (2020) and “You Play the Girl” (2019) showcase the role of time in her process. The star of “Blue Lies” is the menacing figure looming in the foreground; baring his teeth, he shows himself off to the viewer, arms wide open. To Nafey, the character was originally a showman — a puppet with a large ego, described by her as possessing a “look at me” attitude. The piece’s aging granted the figure a likeness to Donald Trump, in its aura and attributes. The artist fits him with bright orange hair and a swirling background of declaratives, including “I play to people’s fantasies,” and “Nobody’s ever been more successful than me,” direct quotes by Trump. With this representation of Trump in “Blue Lies,” Nafey abstractly conceptualizes the current political climate: The blue, which typically exhibits calm but in this case takes on a sinister air, erupts from the pompous figure’s body and consumes the hopeful yellow tones.

“You Play the Girl,” a piece created over two years, depicts Nafey’s long-observed considerations around femininity. The artist pushes a doll-like figure wearing a tutu and ballet slippers to the background. Nafey tucks other elements into the assorted layers of the piece: Xs and Os, and her mother’s old to-do list, featuring tasks such as “clean bathroom” and “wash clothes.” No one element becomes explicit in the piece, but splotches of color, pattern, and line form together, evoking themes of women’s experiences and gender performance — motifs Nafey continues to interrogate while time as a medium grants her new perspective. This muddiness indicates the nature of Nafey’s own thoughts, feelings, and emotions as she makes sense of these developing points of view.

The fusion of abstraction and realism in Nafey’s work puts it in conversation with the work of Swiss artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) and American artist Romare Bearden (1911–88), modernists who experimented with cubism, surrealism, and collage. What Nafey describes as the “pure poetry” of Klee’s work propagates playful and surprising elements in her own pieces: the collision of discernible figures or faces, and ambiguous shape and line. Collage brings an apparent spontaneity to her works, reminiscent of Bearden’s colorful mosaic-like productions. By coalescing digital work and hand pieces in her art, Nafey reflects the objective of collage: transforming each element into a complete constellation of meaning.

Nafey’s work holds an opaqueness of meaning and form, which she challenges her audience to observe and dissect. Nafey’s own sense of self — her memories, emotions, and perceptions — come into focus for the viewer as they did when Nafey consults the personal in her creation. If the viewer considers the works over time, much like Nafey did in creating them, the viewer’s reward is to comprehend the intricate and purposeful messaging with which she imbues her playful color, depth, and line.

“Blue Lies,” by Lynn Nafey, mixed media (Duralar, plexiglass, paper on woodpanel, ink, color pencil, pigment transfer, and brass), 8.875 x 10.875,’’ 2020.

ARTSWORCESTER

“Art History 201: Art, the Public, and Worcester’s Cultural Institutions,” at Clark University gives students the opportunity to work closely with regional contemporary artists. With individual artists from ArtsWorcester’s gallery programs, the students hone their visual and critical skills by producing short essays positioning the artists’ work within contemporary art history. This year, the students also curated small selections of their artist’s work for these online spotlights. This collaboration was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.