Huck Finn among the ruins
By Bill Sasser
Art Voices
Decaying facades, storm wrecked houses, lush yet burdened landscapes, and young Huck Finn protagonists searching for hidden truths—all figure prominently in the work of painter James Taylor Bonds.
A Louisiana native who grew up in a small town in Alabama, Bonds’ work has focused on impressionistic renderings of architectural subjects. Finding inspiration in vacant industrial buildings, abandoned houses, and the centuries old cityscapes of New Orleans, these paintings are vacant of people, yet hang heavy with the pathos of lives gone missing.
(Click images for larger view)
Bonds earlier work is all about crumbling exteriors, hinting at what my lay beyond or beneath. In his newest cycle, he steps beyond that veil, embracing a range of human figures full of emotion, proceeding from figuration and portraiture into the realm of mythmaking. “My work can be understood as New Orleans as seen through the eyes of a Southern boy, lost in romanticism and despair at the stories and histories of a barely contemporary city, where the past is prominently stained on its streets and facades,” he explains.
As a painter increasingly drawn to storytelling, he names such icons of Southern literature as William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O’Conner, and Mark Twain as influences. In his newest work, Twain’s eponymous Huck Finn becomes Bonds’ alter ego. “He’s the lens through which I’m looking at my surroundings, New Orleans and its environs,” Bonds explains. “He’s a character that offers a darker realism than some of Twain’s other characters. I see using this as a juxtaposition that heightens reality, a sort of self-portrait that is about being lost but also defiantly grasping at a world that is fleeting.”
Bonds’ past and current work will be showcased in two upcoming shows in New Orleans. This month the Home Space Gallery presents a selection of his paintings of Southern landscapes and architecture. A second show in April at Coup d’oeil Art Consortium offers his new foray into portraiture and storytelling.
At the Home Space showing, paintings such as A Site Longing for a Religious Experience and Fog at the River’s Edge show his deft painterly skills and a keen eye for emotive subjects, where ambiguities only heighten their power. The former painting reveals an old revival tent that Bonds encountered in the middle of a cleared cane field along the Mississippi, apparently set up for a land auction. The latter depicts a centuries old plantation house discovered on the same road trip, a ruin that turned out to be inhabited by homeless squatters. “Some of these scenes I find seem so bizarre, even surreal,” he remembers. “Even in such shambles, that old plantation house still had this feeling of grandeur.”
Another painting, On Forstall, New Orleans, La., offers a flood-ruined mobile home in the Lower Ninth Ward, a discovery that eerily reminded him of an almost exact scene he knew from rural Alabama. Such parallels spurred him to wonder about the forgotten histories of these old structures and the past inhabitants. “I started imagining a series of stories which sprang from these places,” he said, “some related to past experience, some that could only be pulled from the soil I was standing on.”
Tentatively at first, Bonds began inhabiting these haunted spaces. In North Dorgenois, he places a scene from the Lower Ninth—another abandoned house in a nearly pastoral landscape—next to an intimate portrait of a shirtless young man with a lowered head. The juxtaposition of the two images creates a charged emotionality that neither would possess standing alone.
Two more recent portraits show the direction Bonds is headed. In Staying/Staying Afloat he imagines a modern day Huck Finn (as self-portrait, with Bonds serving as Finn). And The Faint Smell of Pine again combines two images—a mounted deer head and a dancing girl who could be a stripper—that paired together prove unsettling.
“A definite Southern Gothic sensibility keeps arising in my work, but while I can read writers like Flannery O’Conner, there aren’t many Southern Gothic painters to learn from, so I’ve been inventing my own,” he explains.
Painting in oil and acrylic on canvass, Bonds works from his own photography as well as found photographs and objects. The work of Southern photographer from William Eggleston and William Christenberry had influenced his art, but among modern painters Bonds names two young Romanians, Victor Mann and Adrian Ghenie, as influences. Known for their explorations of often-edgy subject matter, both use gallery spaces to create environments, their work not simply standing alone but intentionally engaged in a dialogue when displayed together.
(Click images for larger view)
Bonds views his own new paintings as collective part of a larger narrative, one that has emerged from his own adventurous wanderings through New Orleans. He is inspired in part by the French “situationists” movement of the 1940s, in which participants held so-called “derives”—constructed yet improvised performance art, involving seemingly nonsensical meanderings through the city.
“I remember being in the Lower Ninth Ward, on North Dorgenois, and something hit me, this intense sensation, and a story started to develop,” says Bonds. “This was a place where a terrible natural disaster occurred, yet looking at it, this was also a beautiful pastoral scene. For me the big appeal of New Orleans is the notion of surfaces and what lies behind them. You see all these visual allegories and metaphors, these century old crumbling facades, and personal adventures and memory become juxtaposed with the actual history of the city.”
An unfinished and as-yet untitled painting that will be part of his Coup d’oeil show places Huck Finn in the Ninth Ward next to a flood-ruined building. Huck stands on a shipping pallet with a push pole in his hand, seemingly navigating an imaginary raft down the Mississippi River.
Rooted in New Orleans and his own notions of adventure, Bonds’ interplay between reality and fantasy results in images that offer affecting, often surreal visions of what is physically present and what might be hidden beneath.