Artist Michael Nolan is not yet 30 years old, but his self-portrait
is one of the most old-fashioned works in the Arizona Biennial
’09 at the Tucson Museum of Art.

The every-other-year survey of contemporary Arizona art is known for
its cutting-edge art materials, and this year’s edition has plenty.
Straight pins, tabloid magazines, a doctor’s scale, numbered stickers
and a faux-fur tent all make their way into the artworks in the
50-piece show. But Tucsonan Nolan, born in 1980, turns to old-school
oil paint for his 2009 “Self-Portrait With Subtle Yet Intoxicating
Emotions.”

That’s not a bad thing. Nicely drawn and thickly painted in quick
expressionist brushstrokes, it’s a glossy, lively work. And the
painting has its own innovations. Nolan limited the colors on the face
to an unrealistic monochrome of white, gray and black, while painting
the backdrop a glowing burnt sienna. He does not hesitate, in a very
contemporary way, to clue us in to his own psyche: His eyes are tight
shut, and his face is screwed up into a grimace that stops just short
of anguish.

Nolan’s opposite number in the self-portrait category is Simon
Donovan. A good 20 years older than Nolan, Donovan is the one
experimenting with new media, in his 2008 video self-portrait, “Lament
of the Mediocre Regional Middle-Aged Art Star Wannabe.” Well-known
around town for his public art, most famously the Diamondback Bridge on
Broadway Boulevard, Donovan jumped genres

a couple of years ago to become a performance artist. Lately, he’s
gotten some attention for the stand-up monologues he does around
town.

His “Lament” ingeniously merges his two art forms: It’s a video
that’s framed and hangs on the wall. If you cover your ears to block
out the sound of Donovan singing and talking, you might even believe
it’s a painting not unlike Nolan’s. The motionless background is a deep
blue universe sparkling with stars. But in the center, poking through
one of the silver- painted stars, is a video cut-out of Donovan’s
gold-painted head in motion. The spoken words pouring out of his video
head limn woes as readily as Nolan’s twisted-up face. Donovan’s
soliloquy is a deeply personal confession, 10 minutes long, that airs
his fears that his best years as an artist are already behind him.

The two self-portraits—one painted, one digital—are yin
and yang, and that’s deliberate. Biennial guest judge Tim Rodgers,
chief curator of the New Mexico Museum of Art, explains in a note that
he wanted to show multiple strands in contemporary art. Many of the
pieces he chose have polar opposites. Some works are dark, others
light, he notes; others are funny or serious, sensitive or ironic, odd
or traditional. Nolan may be traditional and Donovan odd, but both have
a legitimate place at the table of contemporary art.

The 44 artists who made it in—including 23 from
Tucson—prevailed in a tough competition. All artists in Arizona
ages 18 and up were eligible to enter, and this year, 411 tried their
luck. Judging by their birthdates, quite a few are still early in their
careers, but the show includes several 60-somethings. A few artists
made it in with two works, bringing the total number of pieces on view
up to 50.

Phoenix artist Angela Ellsworth is one of the high achievers who
aced the contest with two sculptures. She’s also one who uses startling
materials: She laboriously constructed two prickly pioneer bonnets
entirely out of hatpins.

Her “Seer Bonnets” are decorative—the pearly pinheads glisten
on the outside—but the sharp, silvery points inside are
dangerous. They would pierce any pioneer woman’s head. Her hats are a
nod to the old female arts, the stitching work women once did to
manufacture clothing for their families. While she honors their
skill—and their bravery on the pioneer trails where they wore
such bonnets—she ponders the tedium, and the danger, of their
restricted lives.

Peter Bugg of Tempe also turns a sympathetic eye on cultural norms
that push women around. His 3-D “Diets That Work” consists entirely of
40 pounds of tabloid magazines piled on a doctor’s scale. (The cover
story in the rag on top details “How J. Lo Lost 40 lbs.”) While
Ellsworth still prizes craft in her use of ready-made materials, Bugg
has reduced his artistic enterprise entirely to the idea, another trend
embraced by many younger artists. All he had to do was collect and
pile.

The title of Andrea Jensen’s large painting on a recycled billboard,
“Body Fat,” suggests that she’s investigating the same territory as
Bugg. But her work is as different from his as Donovan’s is from
Nolan’s. She was inspired, she writes, by the psychological spaces she
inhabits when she’s out running and walking, and the result is a loose,
lovely stylized landscape. Bare trees, painted maroon, tilt across a
sloping hillside. Swathes of translucent pink, orange and blue sweep
over the vinyl, and patches of the billboard show through. Born like
Nolan in 1980, she is a resident in Tucson; the two young artists may
be a harbinger of a painting renaissance in town.

Book artist Beata Wehr of Tucson also combines painting and found
objects. She’s put her own marks on her expired Polish passport to
create an elliptical portrait of her bi-cultural life. Inside, she’s
painted the saguaro cacti of her adopted home, but she’s mixed them
with old-world carved pillars from her former home in Europe.

Rodgers’ survey covers most media, but it’s especially strong in
photography. New digital technologies, especially printing techniques,
are allowing artists to experiment. Tucsonan Judy Miller photographs
wax figures in museums and inserts them into new photographed settings.
In “Outtake #14, Lucy 2,” Lucille Ball has been relocated into a dusty
lakeside cabin.

A young Flagstaff artist, Joe Cornett, has made a pair of gorgeously
colored pigment prints, “Private Dining” and “Grubsteak.” Both photos
picture the rich interior of a restaurant dining room, each adorned
with fantasy paintings of a sublime Western landscape. Cornett notes
that with rapid development, in the future, we may have “only have
representations and idealized landscapes to visit.”

Fears about environmental degradation are a strong subtext in the
show. Chris Miller, a painter living in the sprawl of Chandler, has
stranded a pair of suburban cowboys in chaps amid the tile-topped,
garage houses of the New West. Robert Renfrow of Tucson photographed
the cheerful colored flags of the surveyor’s trade; they wave gaily,
and ominously, in an unspoiled landscape of mountain and plain.
Tucsonan Gwyneth Scally reprises her MFA installation of last spring,
constructing a tent out of the white (faux) fur of the endangered polar
bear; inside is a painting of melting icebergs.

A parallel trend, though, among Arizona artists, is a sheer joy in
color and pattern. Grant Wiggins of Tempe revives the ’60s in a pop-art
painting in teal and tan. Photographer Karen M. Strom of Sonoita
reconstructs a regional motel as a celebration of curve and line.
“Night Sky” by Dominic Miller of Phoenix is a joyous circle of stars,
made of pinholes pricked in a sheet of paper inked black. Tucsonan
Chase Cotter’s “Color Play” is a complicated pattern painting of tiny
squares painted in all the colors of the crayon box.

And David Elliott, also of Tucson, has made a major work out of a
bowl of Trix. In a digital print named for the cereal, the gigantic
Trix balls parade across a 5-foot sweep of photo paper. The crunchy
colored spheres are elevated and magnified, and embedded with childhood
memories; they’re like Proust’s madeleines, reconstituted for
the age of the TV cartoon.

This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.