Strings on Me: Ethan Gill, Left Field Gallery

Mar 14

Mar 14 Strings on Me: Ethan Gill, Left Field Gallery

Los Osos, Left Field Gallery, Print Issue

By Audrey Lopez

“I’ve got no strings / To hold me down / To make me fret / Or make me frown / I had strings / But now I’m free / There are no strings on me.” So sings the character of Pinocchio—a young wooden puppet prone to lying—in his compulsory stage debut ordered by the predatory theater director and puppet master who later imprisons him. Although Pinocchio’s song and dance succeed in entertaining the crowd, who shower him with laughter and the stage with gold coins, their cheers suppress the dark truths of how Pinocchio came to be on stage and the sinister realities he will face when he leaves it.

Pinocchio’s agentive dilemmas seem to have taken up some recent brain space for San Francisco- and Chicago-based artist Ethan Gill, palpable in a series of new oil paintings for Strings on Me, his latest solo show at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos. Referenced across the show’s title and several pieces, Pinocchio is described by Gill as a story employed to “teach us to tell the truth so that we can believe in ourselves when faced with challenges.”

*Ethan Gill, Entangled Hand, oil on canvas*

Urging inquiries beyond such simplistic, singular lessons typically gleaned from Disneyfied versions of folk narratives, Gill’s practice itself builds through multiple iterations: the extended drying time of oils allows him to paint, rework, scrape and wash away various images before attaining one that “holds up” the direction of a particular work. In this manner, thirteen paintings organically came together to form Strings on Me, an exploration of what happens when truth feels “too complicated, inconvenient, confusing, scary or unknowable.”

While humans might usually be tempted to buy, talk or pleasure themselves out of facing such uncomfortable expeditions, the events of 2020 vaporized habitual escape routes, and the characters on view in Strings on Me were granted no exceptions. Their relationship to any uneasy truths found along the way, however, and what roles they played in shaping them, remain murky. Anxious eyes peer out from vibrant folds of flesh, while twisted fingers are lit by unseen flames. Bulbous, Olmec-like visages and figures bulge, swell and droop toward canvas boundaries. In one painting, “Liar,” a flabby-faced Pinocchio is surprised by a mutant version of his notorious wooden nose which curves around and pokes his own forehead. Things are not okay.

Even the bright, potential joy of Gill’s lush color palette belies a tangled complicity among the contorted articulations of fingers and hands that make up the bulk of the exhibition. Hands, with lines formed out of lifetimes, the strings they’ve pulled, and the stories they tell, have long been a source for artists’ creative expression. Hands go up in protest or behind backs in handcuffs, shake with fear and crumple in anguish. Fingers cross when telling lies and become ensnared in their own manipulations. But fingers can also maneuver into mudras intended to heal and protect, and hands can raise fists, throw shakas or sign on channels beyond the range and reach of dominant ears and eyes.

Basking in these ambiguities, the tensions and anxieties underlying Strings on Me are less overt than the suffering, despair, rage and resistance found in the paintings of Ecuadorian Kichwa artist Oswaldo Guayasamín that Gill’s work brings to mind. Yet the roots of institutionalized violence, poverty and anti-Indigeneity that Guayasamín faced in 1920s Quito are profoundly familiar to California artists and audiences of the early 2020s, who simultaneously navigate survival and their roles in a global pandemic, attempted political coups, racialized police brutality, a housing crisis and multiple environmental emergencies, all during the altered temporalities of quarantine.

Whether it’s the self-harming Pinocchio, the anonymous gnarled fingers and knobby faces, or the voluptuous, halfspasmed, half-wilted, mascara-melted figure of Miss Piggy, Gill’s characters have been through it this year, and are likely to find more empathy than usual among 2020-weathered viewers. Though the unsettling, unsettled questions of agency it raises are not new, Strings on Me sounds a subtle, effective call for intimate investigations of the strings pulled, tied and plucked by ourselves and others, especially now, with so much time—and so much grief—on our hands.