Department of Art

Cosmic Lingerie , the title of a painting Jane Callister made in 2001, pretty much sums up where her art comes from and where it takes viewers who take its promiscuous propositions seriously. Making odd bedfellows of Stephen Hawkins and Victoria's Secret, Callister's multi-purpose picture of hard-edged drips, lacy stalactites and melted ice-cream colors marries the entertaining erudition of the popular scientist (whose cosmological musing are collected in best-selling books) to the erotic apparel of the popular store (whose titillating displays drop the jaws of mall-goers all across America). In Callister's hands, there's no difference between the ornamental and the organic.

Other works from this series, such as Sonic Drip , Gravity Cavity , Green Chaos , Black Holes in My Stocking #2, and String Theory #1, also treat elaborate forms of artifice as if they were perfectly natural phenomena. All of these modestly scaled acrylics on canvas take painting well beyond the stodgy oppositions that once animated its discourse: abstraction versus representation, figure versus ground, color versus line, content versus form, and the personal versus the political. Simultaneously intimate and intergalactic, down-to-earth and out-of-this-world, Callister's sexy images of paint doing what it does best-- dripping, mixing, running, and covering--draws viewers into a scale-defying world where pleasure and knowledge rub up against one another, making it extremely difficult, if not pointless, to distinguish between choice and necessity.

The human body, in all its androgynous complexity, lies behind this body of work, which occupied Callister for the better part of 2000 and 2001. In a previous series of larger framed paintings, collectively titled "Pornamental", she included more explicit depictions of the human figure. In Xtasty , for example, the moss-green silhouettes of dozens of men and women caught up in an all-consuming orgy overlap to form a lasciviously elegant backdrop. Purple-tinted couples, set in faux frosting frames shaped like heraldic emblems and Rococo architectural embellishments, enact various scenes from the Kama Sutra. The drips that spill from all of their melded forms, which seem to be melting in the heat of passion, heighten the fluidity of Callister's loosely symmetrical composition.

Her newest paintings dispense with the implicit and explicit bodily references of her earlier works. Although Magicmindscape follows the vertical format of nearly all of Callister's works from the last five years, it has the presence of an abstract landscape, a mountainous terrain in which millions of years of geological activity are compressed into a stop-action image of viscous flows, marbleized swirls, and mutant fusions of unnatural colors. Oriented horizontally, the rest of her most recent works, including Floating Landscape, Liquid Mindscape, and Liquid Landscape, openly evoke the physical space of the contemporary world, a thoroughly cultural landscape in which it ís impossible to disentangle artifice from nature, fact from fiction, fantasy from reality. Pitting a queasy miasma of molten pours of paint against smoothly textured sections that resemble cartoon cliffs, rocky mountain faces, and fade-away skies (made of progressive gradations of single colors), Callister's potent paintings thrust viewers into a virtual world that is at once unbelievable and undeniable, smart and sensuous.