ART IN AMERICA, November 1997~ Elizabeth Hayt

LINDA BURNHAM
Jessica Fredericks Gallery

For her first solo show in New York, Linda Burnham, an L.A. artist, served up frothy paintings on stretched 50’s tablecloths which represent family values and courtship rituals gone berserk. Enlarging dingbats from graphic design catalogues of the same era and painting the black, linear characters on the tablecloths, Burnham depicts game-show hosts, dim-witted dames, and nerdy businessmen cavorting and careening across the cheery textile surfaces. The men in Burnham’s images are hotheaded, slaphappy types, while the women are either harried homemakers or bimbo Girl-Fridays. Looking through a post-feminine-mystique lens, with 90’s dysfunctional families in mind, Burnham’s paintings are ironic commentaries on the vintage ideals of domesticity, marital harmony and family togetherness.

Burnham layers her found images one atop the other in Sigmar Polke fashion. In addition, she paints big, loopy abstract gestural strokes over the narratives, further animating the scenes and upping their emotional ante. Were it not for the innuendos of sex and violence spicing up the action, Burnham’s work would seem only a campy rerun of the clichés of a bygone era.

In Book Cadillac (1997), a hassled housewife bends over, her butt perched enticingly in the air, to pick up a heap of dirty laundry cast on the floor. Dart lines and stars zing from her lower back, signaling the back-breaking labor of her work. Cigarette burns originally found on the tablecloth pockmark the fabric-cum-canvas implying both the latent abuse and ennui of household drudgery. Over this image, Burnham paints two male figures. One appears to bolt from the scene, the other stands roaring with laughter. Neither could care less about the unhappy housewife; they seem to either reject or mock her; these men are uncaring louts while the woman is a pathetic martyr. By coupling dopey cartoon characters to create mean-spirited narrative, Burnham casts a cynical eye on our nostalgia for earlier times, suggesting that memory tends to be gentler that reality ever was.