The Reader’s Choice: Ryan Fenchel, Isak Applin, and Lilli Carré (tie)
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Ryan Fenchel’s elegant sculptures, collages, and drawings combine contemporary iconography with the mystical hermeticist notion of God as a master of secret magical arts. For a multimedia installation at Vega Estates last fall he spent months carving an abstract sculpture out of a block of salt, a substance dense both in mass and in associations from alchemical lore. This grueling effort turned the piece into the spooky artifact of a self-mortifying performance practice, in the bold tradition of Joseph Beuys.
The free-flowing, sinuous beauty of Lilli Carré’s lines and forms create an uncanny contrast with the shadowy psychological thickets through which her characters silently wander in gloomy comics, animations, and illustrations. The splatter-noir of Charles Burns seems distantly present, but Carré’s recent graphic novel The Lagoon—in which ethereal music draws townspeople to a ghostly swamp—is less a nightmare than a mysterious dream. My favorite Carré animation is What Hits the Moon, a surreal, somnambulistic reverie in which death and decomposition occasion unutterable heartbreak. —Bert Stabler
