Tiffany Calvert, who’s showing eight witty paintings at Lisa Boyle, is fascinated by museum dioramas and other extravagantly artificial interiors. During her first year of grad school at Rutgers her interest in medically inspired images, which she’d been doing for years, was waning. When a fellow student asked her what she really cared about, Calvert recalled her “near obsession” with the dioramas at the Field Museum (she lived here from 2000 to 2003) and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (she now lives in New Jersey). She’s not the only artist to be fascinated by such displays’ illusions; Robert Smithson was too. “The trees were cast one leaf at a time, and are incredibly detailed,” Calvert says. “There’s a line of grass to disguise the beginning of the painted back wall, which is usually curved. They have to pay a lot of attention to the lighting to avoid casting shadows on the wall.” Calvert wanted to bring out the arranged and constructed nature of these interiors–the play between flatness and depth, the way reconstructions of nature reflect a wish for conquest–by further arranging them. She began photographing dioramas, replacing the backgrounds in Photoshop, and painting from her digital composites. “It was a great relief to be able to use any color I wanted, to have something a little bit humorous in the work, and to put in things that I didn’t have an explanation for.” In Untitled (Musk Ox), a large dark animal hovers in front of a background mostly taken from a Gainsborough painting–but the red curtain is from a Vermeer. These disjunctions are intended to open up the work: “While I am critical of the 19th-century conquest, I wouldn’t want to make art that’s dictatorial.”
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Tiffany Calvert
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Josh Azzarella.
