Small is good too. Global economies seem driven by mega, gargantuan corporations with relentless,unnecessary and continuous change. Underneath this corporate umbrella is a facade of stability and a safety net considered "It's good enough" - and - "We get by." Uncelebrated lives in towns are the 'ballast', the counter weight, to the ambition gone wild over the last forty years. Michna paints what we all know of pre-corporate, pre-conglomerate America. Her body of work lets us return to the strengths exhibited in the ordinary family, home, and small business. Making a living is 'good enough'. The people in our town are 'good enough'. An ordinary home is 'good enough'. Plain and ordinary means 'good enough'. Fancy and elaborate is not a necessary option. Michna focuses on the 'ordinary' representation of the America, the place and lifestyle we once knew. We know deep in our hearts that this basic America is good enough. There is a nobility in the concrete block of small business, the old home built by the owner, the re-use of existing structures for coin-op laundry and ice cream stands. The outdated pay phone, re-dialing with the breath and sweat of urgent human monologues racing against the coin slot of time. No free minutes here. Only a simple understanding of who we are and where we are.
My most recent paintings are studies of disappearing America. Imagery inspired by a pre-corporate time. The ordinary, the everyday, the simple.
Social historians of the United States have tried to understand the
restless physical movement of Americans at least since Frederick Jackson
Turner put forward his famous frontier thesis in 1893. The churning of
the population, marching east to west, from the Plymouth Rock Puritans
of 17th century Massachusetts to a gathering of hedonists near Seal
Rock in La Jolla today, the mobility of yearning stamps our culture.
Look closely at Mary Ann Michna’s wonderful impressionistic documents of
small town diners, bars, motels and streetscapes and you come away with
an altogether different story, or more likely, set of stories.
It is easy to see a kind of haunting stasis in many of these paintings.
Modest architectural artifacts of times past sit, stolid and dignified,
often near flat black asphalt parking lots. No human beings intrude.
Merciless skies of white hot, patchy or cobalt blue rest like a
smothering weight on top of these apparently deserted monuments to lives
that did or did not move, did or did not, in Huckleberry Finn’s famous
line, “light off for the territory ahead of the rest.”
But look again. Think again. There’s a traffic light swinging in the
street, stuck on green. A telephone box juts out of the side of a
building; a bright red car is carefully parked nearby. And the empty
parking lot often turns out not to be empty at all. It appears to be
recently lined with slanting strips of bright yellow paint, inviting
young kids in their first car or a scowling tradesman in a rusting
pickup to pull in. These spaces need not connote emptiness and leaving.
That’s your choice, perhaps your feeling and plan. Michna’s not saying.
And then there are a series of seemingly very different kinds of
paintings set along a busy commercial strip. No space waiting to be
filled here. Michna gives us (see ffjungle4) an accordion vision of
signboard shouts for recognition, the enjambment of fast food
establishments rendered in their garish, market tested colors.
The scene tells the anywhere and everywhere story of sameness across the
United States. The vertical, foreshortened perspective heightens the
cramped reality of the subject. A car dealership does battle with a
nearby Dennys; a Wendy’s marquee faces off with the biggest kid on the
block, the Golden Arches of McDonalds. All signs reach for the sky and
your eye. Telephone and power lines bisect the scene, but their
horizontal stretch cannot rope in the verticals filling the canvas.
Yet there is a haunting here as in the quiet scenes of solitary stores
set out on placid horizontal planes discussed above. Look closely at
ffjungle4. Look past and through the tangle of industrial jungle reds
and yellows. There in the background, almost smudged in haze though the
day is clear and cloudless, stands a partial view of what once was an
iconic court house. Now it’s a grayish memory being crowded out by
sprawl and a too bright present, a too insistent present.