In her exhibition Gimme Shelter, at the Architectural Foundation gallery, mixed-media artist Marcia Rickard deals with destruction, displacement, natural disaster, and wartime upheaval, a thematic constant being the fragility of a sense of home and shelter. Rickard, a retired art historian and artist, confers a global and cross-historical perspective on her range of subjects. This series was first inspired in 2014 by the tragedy of Aleppo, Syria, and she has directed her attentions laterally from the troubled terrains of Ukraine, Gaza, and, from a timely local angle, scenes of the cityscape-altering Santa Barbara earthquake of 1925.
And yet the most memorable single piece in the show basks in relative calm, for the moment. Painted in a realist mode, but with surreal overtones, “The Fragility of Home” is a peaceful home by night, lit by a streetlamp and the warm glow of living room light. Alas, danger and vulnerability lurk in the form of a black cat slinking on the sidewalk and, most prominently, a massive boulder hovering over the house, consuming the upper half of the composition.
In this unabashed nod to René Magritte’s famed levitating boulder paintings, the threat to the domestic structure and the very life of its inhabitants is more literal than Magritte’s poetic or existential buzz. Rickard’s diverse worldly examples of uprooted shelters in the gallery serve to detail real-world calamities, worthy of our sympathy and indignation.
Following on the idea of an imminent threat to safety and well-being, a major veritable “boulder” abruptly crashed into our town a century ago. Propitiously timed images of the 1925 earthquake — the 100th anniversary of which just passed — are logically depicted in states of funk-art-y and collaged roughness, in imagery and materials…