re-title.com

Cat With Raw Nose 2007 beeswax sculpture

Jan Harrison works in a variety of media, ranging from pastel and ink on rag paper, to encaustic paintings, to sculptures in beeswax, bronze, and bisque-fired porcelain. She has exhibited sculptural installations, which have included the artist speaking and singing in Animal Tongues. She has created two house-as-art projects, as well as early mixed-media quilts as art. Much of her work includes charcoal and pastel works on paper. The �beings� in her art go through various stages of metamorphosis as the material is caressed, layered, scraped, incised, and fused together. For Harrison, there is a close connection between process and content; her pieces go through both a physical and conceptual mutation as they evolve.

Dog with no Legs 1997 bisque-fired porcelain

(continued from page 1) George Quasha

She thinks tenderly of Pandora and opens her box for inspiration. She offers thresholds of intimate other dimensions. At the drop of a hat she sings creaturely love songs in unknown animal tongues. She helps us see/hear ourselves in the animal with the quality of the animal finding itself in us. This puts an unthinkable, even unconscionable burden on us � a burden, however, welcomed by that part of us that is ready to be warrior, pilgrim, or lover of Being itself. When you look her sad, longing, animated daemonial creatures in their beastly intimate eyes redly glowing, it mirrors, stirring an immemorial familiarity. Its images can weigh us so far down we're looking out on our world, and in a flash, bouncing back to reflection of my strange face. Reach out and fuse someone-something, have a Minotaurial moment � ancient myth tracing our own possible psychic confusion, our confusing possibility. Who would I be in another kind of skin. What does it feel like to lie with the cat half in its world, half in one's own.
She teaches us to have flashes of insight in the backbrain, reptilian heartthrobs, the feel of the doubling serpentine tongue, amphibial fantasies of a bliss of between �

between species, selves, worlds, dimensions. Extrasensory surrender. Out of the body into another. Interspecies self- portraiture. Totemic confession. Flying reveries. The torque of dreaming awake with pastels blazing. This is liminal being with highwire intensity�and no more human vs. animal, and especially no more diminution of the animal as something sub-human, rather than the essential reality of any other in the natural mystery of its primacy. If each being is unique to itself when it has the heart to see by way of its ownmost vision, here is its art form, wherein a creature knows its right to be in all its sexy weirdness. Jan Harrison knows animals as full-scale beings, and she reflects us as only full-scale to ourselves when we know and love the animal that fleshes us out, in and over. The animal is a nature of being, of our being, and what we call animal is being in its other ways than the forebrain projects. Jan re-projects Pandora's terrors as primal panorama. She works the self-imaging every natural thing is somehow part of, finds its strange intelligence. Somehow its magic is to release us from our dying images, to set us out on our journey of the precariously beautiful, with its unlimiting energy and self-secret identity, and we are, to transpose Yeats, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.

Now You See Me diptych 1996