Art Review: Elizabeth Alley's 'Go Change': Women in thrall of ambiguous love

"I am pretending to enjoy the view while I think about next week's to-do list," oil on canvas, Elizabeth Alley

Visitors going to Flicker Street Studio to look at Elizabeth Alley's spare but resonant exhibition "Go Change" should walk straight in the door, through the L-shaped gallery that is the building's first room and into the large classroom to the back wall.

There, they will find the piece they should encounter first, a long, narrow strip of paper that contains the — for want of a better term — graphic narrative called "Drawing Stories." Begin here by reading the tale of Mary Anne, a teacher who starts out for work on a Thursday morning and just continues driving until she gets to Hot Springs. It's obviously Mary Anne's time to break out, get away, think about her life and come to a few decisions.

The title of the exhibition, on display through Sept. 30, seems fraught with ambiguity. We hear a mother's voice on seeing the appalling or suggestive outfit that a teenager intends to wear to school or on a date: "Go change." We also hear, however, the unspoken — or perhaps ardently verbalized — mantra of one person in a relationship to the other person, "Go change," as in, "Please, go become somebody different, be better, more thoughtful, sexier, less sexy, whatever, just change!"

The exhibition's subtext, both in "Drawing Stories" and in the oil-on-canvas paintings in the front gallery, seems to be, "Who said that women have to be in charge of relationships?" Especially in "Drawing Stories," with its exquisite little pencil sketches of the food that Mary Anne eats, the dresses she buys, the Arlington Hotel sheltered by a sheaf of yellow stars, as in a children's book, we feel acutely the responsibility that has somehow been foisted on women to make everything right. Mary Anne summons her sister, Cherry, whose marriage is going through a deep malaise, to meet her in Hot Springs, and when the sisters are together, the sense of their loss of anchor, of romantic certitude, intensifies.

Even the titles of the paintings convey an emotional frisson that's lightly ironic and darkly humorous with undertones of bravado, as in: "I am pretending to enjoy the view while I think about next week's to-do list"; "The only thing I have control of here is what I'm wearing"; "I ran away because I don't need anybody, but I do need these new shoes."

As is her habit, Alley depicts the people who are her subjects, mainly women, in truncated fashion, so we don't see heads or faces, but we observe their clothed bodies, their legs and feet and shoes, while the primary psychological emphasis lies in the positioning of bodies in ambiguous context.

The best example is "I am pretending to enjoy the view while I think about next week's to-do list," a "portrait" of three women — one wearing a suit; one a skirt, blouse and sweater; and the third a shirtwaist dress — standing outdoors against some shrubbery as a background. The woman wearing a suit stands slightly away from the other two, who are right of the painting's center-line facing the viewer's left. The trick is to discern who the "speaker" of the title is, the "I." It could be the woman in the suit, though the woman to her right raises her right arm: Is she waving? Shielding her eyes?

Even the title is ambiguous. Does it mean that the "speaker" is so oppressed by her to-do list that she cannot appreciate the view before her? Or does she mean that she is so bored by the banality of the view that she would rather think about "next week's to-do list"?

Any answers to these questions would be speculation. The joy in looking at the works in "Go Change," though, lies precisely in the disturbing ambivalence that keeps us off-balance. As in a short story by Raymond Carver, Alley's paintings leave us with the supposition that beneath the surface detail of middle-class life and love, a vast dark gulf awaits.

Elizabeth Alley, 'Go Change'

At Flicker Street Studio, 74 Flicker, through Sept. 30. Call Nancy Cheairs at (901) 767-2999 or Elizabeth Alley at (901) 210-2222

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