PRESS
Selected Press Excerpts
Mallinson visits the far-flung quarters of the international scene imaginatively by way of the round-the-clock media barrage of television, print, and the world-wide internet. She reorients into global composites scenery that landscapes in earlier centuries portrayed in segmental glimpses of specific palaces, places, and localities…….Wildlife butts up insouciantly against civilization, predatory animals mingling among skiers, swimmers, bikers, and hunters…..This single minded plenum mundi of peoples and geographies is complicated by Mallinson’s satirical beautification of the landscape with such banal Sierra Club calendar art as waterfalls—“landscape porn” she calls them—which she recontextualizes into the scenery as parodies of the “picturesque in extremis” to offset the reductive entrapments of the ideal rigged by nature’s attractions for the unwary artist….The overload of imagery squeezed onto a format of rare reduced dimension, becomes a pithy metaphor for the painting’s fully realized depictions of the latitudes and longitudes of what is wrong in human and international relations ….[she] proposes that the paradigm of nature we love, protect, and enhance is in reality a pastiche of beliefs, motivations, and hidden agendas……[she] is quite aware of the multi-layers of inherently conflicting interests complicating her picture, and by extension, the history of painting and the revitalization of the landscape tradition..The result is a superscape of heterogenous sights homogenized into one world…to proffer ideascapes warning us of global civilization’s shortcomings and abuses, physical scarifications of the earth, warming trends, greenhouse atmospherics, and never ending deconstructions and reinventions of nature.”
From The catalogue essay “Contemporary Soliloquies on the Natural World” USC Fisher Gallery 2006 by Max F. Schulz
“Mallinson’s intention was to explore the paradoxes about what constitutes “landscape” today—how the consumption and degradation of the natural world exists simultaneously with a perfected Technicolor representation of nature and the sublime beauty of painting… Mallinson wanted to enlist the language of paint to move viewers emotionally and psychologically with nature and landscape as her primary subjects..her new search [is] a more condensed, direct and immediate meditation on life, death, and our world now.”
Rebecca McGrew in Catalogue Nature Morte, Pomona College Museum of Art 2009
“With tremendous acuity Mallinson renders human anatomy out of the anatomy of trees—gnarled burls, sinuous knots and fungus blooming bark. The gorgeous offsets the grotesque; homage tempers horror…the painting is bittersweet and ravishing.”
Leah Ollman, L.A. Times, Feb. 6, 2009
“Creepy and compelling, the imagery suggests the way in which we project ourselves on conceptions of nature, creating the natural world even as we go about assuring its destruction.”
Christopher Knight, L.A. Times, Oct. 2, 2009
“Haunting.”
Doug Harvey, L.A. Weekly, Sept. 11, 2009
“These, combining Arcimboldo’s playfulness with Duchampian cleverness, the emotive intensity of Edvard Munch and confrontational brutality of Hans Belmer and the body language of Ray Bolger’s scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, are hard to look at yet are mesmerizing, evoking more pathos than most pictures of flesh and bone, and stirring a genuine sense of connection to nature even as you revel in their artifice.”
Christopher Miles, L.A. Weekly, Jan 30, 2009
“Mallinson’s decay-ridden scenarios take us back to the more primal, abject content of gothis art. The dazzling, finely rendered draughtsmanship and trompe l’oeil realism of her works invoke a sense of the uncanny, weakening rational responses and sparking visceral reactions….Conjoining ecological and corporeal concerns, the works present the troubled nature of nature in a society set on self destruction…”
Michael Duncan Catalogue Essay for Pomona College Art Museum
“The questions Mallinson asks in her new body of work are not interrogatory—in demand of answers—but they are probes into the nature of forms seen/unseen. In her gathering and recompositing, in this fetishistic anthropomorphous that calls to mind a certain sorcery, she exercises the craftiness of the consummate artist. The “Nature Morte” series shows us how the dream fabric of our reality is inhabited by invisible beings engaged in acts that we have committed countless times, leads us into a forest of signs, and leaves us there to wonder.”
Rita Valencia, The Times Quotidia