Inventing a new life
Artist creates narratives by painting over old photos
By Victoria Dalkey -- Bee Art Correspondent

Fey is a fine old word of Scottish derivation with multiple meanings. It's connected to death, meaning doomed, fated to die or marked by a foreboding of death or calamity. It also implies a visionary ability to look into the future and suggests an otherworldly air or attitude. And then, too, it can mean crazy or touched. All of the above apply to "Folk Tales," a show of Galelyn Williams' new mixed media works and assemblages at Jay Jay.

Using late 19th century studio photographs of young people (children in fancy dress, courting couples and newlyweds) stiltedly posed against fictive backdrops (ornate interiors, flower-filled courtyards), Williams paints over the images, inventing fantastic, oblique narratives that give a strange new life to people long gone and forgotten.

Signifiers of identity and status, these formal photographs from a bygone era served as mementos of lives aspired to rather than lives achieved. Either by intuition or purpose, Williams has selected as her subjects the young and the hopeful, poignantly posed in their very best clothes in pretty, pastoral settings or fancy interiors, people who, like all of us, are doomed to die, their youthful fragility endangered by uncertain futures.

In working the images over, she transforms them slyly into creatures of fantasy or fable, enhancing the backdrops with fairy tale colors, adding a cat's ears or horns to the heads so that the beings seem to have sprung from some looking-glass world of metamorphosing mutations.

In "Two Emilys," a pair of young women with heads touching and arms around each other's waists stand in a magical garden. Williams has slyly whittled away at the figure on the left, making it angular and awkward and adding a black horn sprouting from her ear. Her sister, with flowing red hair and strangely light, otherworldly eyes, also sprouts a horn, delicate and pink, arcing up on the right so that the two horns form a crescent moon divided into dark and light phases. Calling up associations with Snow White and Rose Red or the Wicked Witch of the East and Glenda the Good, it's an eerie and compelling image, both crazy and touched, presenting a warped, yet hauntingly poetic, reality.

Williams proceeds in the same way, giving us "Bea and Belle," a pair of women suggesting clairvoyants in dunce caps, and "Claire and Francis," a man with a blue face and a woman with red animal ears, who somehow seem made for each other. "Rex" is a little boy in doublet and hose in an imaginary landscape. The photographer's name and address written below tells us the original photo was taken in Modesto and not some fabulous fairyland, adding an ironic footnote to the image.

In "Wedding Murder," Williams intensifies the surrealism of her imagery, giving us three portraits of newlyweds, some inexplicably turning into crows. The title may stem from the fact that a flock of crows is referred to as a murder of crows, but it seems to have darker implications about matrimony. Next to it is another startling image, a portrait of a lush redhead with blackbirds nesting in her thick, curly hair and a songbird perched on her shoulder that blends romanticism and the macabre.

Williams has arranged a number of small works into a loose installation on one wall of the gallery, which presumably can be read as a narrative of sorts though it remained mysterious to me. The installation includes some strong images, though, especially a work titled "Fig Tree," which seems to be a reflection of the current crisis in the Catholic Church. It takes the form of two dictionary pages with definitions ranging from "connection" to "Catholicism," on which Williams has drawn a schematic tree, suggesting a family tree or genealogical chart. In the center is an image of a young boy attended by a wizard-like priest.The tree might be the tree of life or the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit Eve plucked and gave to Adam, causing the fall of man. A number of words from the dictionary pages are underlined providing an enigmatic subtext about the nature of evil.

Williams also shows several assemblages that hark back to her earlier work which extended the tradition of Joseph Cornell's boxes. They are finely balanced accretions of objects both precious -- moths and butterflies -- and kitschy -- a plastic Madonna holding a plastic Christ on his side. The most fascinating is a self-portrait in the form of a rolled up photo of Williams as a young girl inside a glass test tube placed inside a series of glass bell jars. It's both beautiful and mind bending with its succession of curved glass containers intriguing both the eye and the mind. Prints, charming
"Hand Picked," a selection of prints from Magnolia Editions, a Bay Area fine-art press that has produced strong graphics by some of California's finest artists, fills the gallery's back room. The show ranges from Rupert Garcia's bold woodblock portrait of Frida Kahlo to Guy Diehl's subtle still life of a tangerine atop a book.

Among the standouts are Joan Brown's vibrant print of a swimmer underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Donald Farnsworth's haunting mixed-media image of a delicate woman's face embedded in hand-made paper, and Squeak Carnwath's juicy, graphically rich diptych "Do Birds Think?"

Galelyn Williams' "Folk Tales" and "Hand Picked"
WHEN: 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, through Dec. 21
WHERE: Jay Jay, 5520 Elvas Ave.
INFORMATION: (916) 453-2999