CRUSADER
FOLLIES
An Allegory for the Road
“Honk
if you love Jesus.” “Come Oil Ye Faithful.” How
have the crusades for Christ and petroleum gotten so mixed up? Are
truckers the knights of our roads, and how is an l8 wheeler like
a medieval war horse? Alice van Buren will explore this terrain
with a talk and a show of her paintings at the Philip
Bareiss Gallery in Taos, opening on March 30.
“Crusader
Follies” is an extended allegory in paint, a twist on the
link between our oil-driven culture and the horse-based Crusades.
Gasoline knights, bishops blessing big rigs, sisters of mercy line
up for the ride, all on horse back in a truck stop world. The
series includes large and small paintings, works on paper and
several installations: Oil
Rules (jouster’s dummy with oil drums), Twin Pennants
for the House of Saud and the White House and Gas
Stations of the Cross, a miniature golf course, where you putt
from pump to pump, on the way to wind, water and sun. This series
has been in the works since l999. Horse-power was the driving idea,
well before 9/ll and the war in Iraq. Exploring the power of horses
in art and war, the artist has found a metaphor that extends from
the medieval joust to the American highway and the geo-politics
of oil.
Alice van Buren is a painter, a playwright and essayist, and a keeper
of horses. Educated at Harvard and Brown, she studied painting at
the Rhode Island School of Design and print-making in France. She
has been a journalist, a book artist and a radio commentator in
Paris. She moved to New Mexico, via Taos, where she was a fellow
at the Wurlitzer Foundation in l996. She now lives in Santa Fe at
Sculpture Ranch, a venue for outdoor and land-based art, co-founded
with her husband, the sculptor Nathaniel Hesse.
Alice
van Buren
avb@swcp. com
505-471-8255
