The embroideries, drawings and watercolors in Jessica Rankin’s latest solo show, while serene on the surface, hide tumultuous thoughts. On panels of organdy, she’s stitched provocative textual fragments from a Babylonian creation myth, along with diaristic phrases from other sources, which together present a picture of celestial failings and human weakness. Beautiful yet restrained, the contrast between content and delivery is both provocative and puzzling.
A gorgeous image of a shimmering moon in the first gallery introduces the show’s loose theme: Aspects of nature can act as metaphors for human misunderstandings. Titled Termagant, the piece has two referents (an old Western notion of the Muslim god’s identity and a quarrelsome woman) that, while unrelated, both sprang from failed communication between individuals or groups. In another panel, lines of text form concrete poetry, resembling the crags of mountaintops, though phrases relating to a blank night or weak body suggest a similarly rocky psychic terrain. Similarly, the profound pessimism in the texts that describe Babylonian immortals—a mother who loathes her children, a father overly proud of his son—read like a lament for a prelapsarian time that never was.
Comparing ancient times to present-day experience is fertile territory, but not one that Rankin explores deeply and the meaning of these semiabstract images remains as ephemeral as the fabric they’re sewn on. Rankin seems to like it that way, though she runs the risk that, consequently, our memory of this show will be equally fleeting.