Art Review | A Mother’s Artistic Instincts on View

Madeleine Eve Ignon’s exhibition at the Architectural Foundation gallery is about art for art’s sake, but with a special and highly particular agenda attached: It is also art for motherhood’s sake. Ignon, who works in the multimedia and graphic art modes, created this body of work during her pregnancy and a year and a half after the birth of her daughter, a before-and-after framework that informs the art.

Her show is titled the taut and the lush, a phrase taken from friend Kathleen Loe’s poem and alluding to the vicissitudes of emotional and logistical sea changes manifested in the life of a mother-artist. It’s a complicated, timeless story of the human condition, befitting the tender and searching nature of her art here.

Ignon, who has exhibited and engaged in residencies in various cities (including Ojai’s Taft Gardens and Nature Preserve), is currently teaching at Santa Barbara City College and at UCSB College of Creative Studies. She earned her MFA at UCSB in 2019 and presented an impressive mini-exhibition in the MFA Graduate show that year, when I wrote in a review that “Ignon’s art nook is given over to her large, loose, and jangly variation on the collaging theme, from discrete collages to an entire wall — ‘wall collage’ — sparsely splashed with detritus and minimalist charm.”

That collage-referential instinct and interest in culling pieces into newly created wholes continues in her new exhibition, especially in the first piece in the gallery, “foot and plenty.” It is a pun-hugging and sweet collage-style painting with an infant’s foot, a snoozing cat, and the fragmented word “plen-ty.”

Ignon’s new work largely traffics in painted imagery of domesticity from different angles and often cryptically cropped perspectives. A key painting is “before and after,” adjoining images of a gleaming decorative silver bowl and a spaghetti strainer, that more utilitarian kitchen object. Wisps of inside humor sneak in at times, as in “uh oh (spilled),” with the word “whoops” written as if in toothpaste over the depiction of a spill, giving rise to an almost abstract view of said goopy mishap. Art and life collide, happily and messily.

The leitmotif of a breast pump is featured up front and center in “breast pump song (after Joan Miro),” an intimate view of a pump affixed to breasts, with the superimposed text “ceci est le son de mes jours” (“this is the sound of my days”), an artworldly nod to Magritte’s iconic “The Treachery of Images” (portrait of a pipe with the disclaimer “ceci n’est pas un pipe”:“this is not a pipe”). The painting “spotlight” highlights and elevates the nozzle of a pump, with its spray emanating a hazy visual free zone.

Ignon’s skill in drawing comes through in a set of drawings from the “before” end of her maternal story, through witty sketches of a pregnant body as model. In “kick,” an aerial view of a very pregnant body appears, foreshortened and with its composition neatly balanced by the bulbous forms of breasts, belly, and knees. 

Leaving the home front, Ignon enters into a cartoony realm of the post-maternal emotional realm in a set of three paintings consisting of punctuation marks signifying frustrated states of being. These are conveyed in speech and thought bubbles, and a sawtoothed-edged enclosure as found in the Batman comics (“Zap!” “Holy Toledo”). For instance, “grawlix II” is a pile-up of a randomly placed salad of an “at” symbol, exclamation point, question mark, and other desultory insignias. Somehow, the composite effect implies the complex implosion of sensation of new parenthood, with winking wit attached.

Tucked almost with understatement in a corner of the show, we find “mini-quilt (love),” a mixed media on sewn canvas piece. The work serves as a quirky and compact twist on the quilting tradition that spotlights an operative word-idea hovering over the entire show: “love.”

Madeleine Ignon’s the taut and the lush is on view at the Architecture Foundation gallery (229 E. Victoria St.) through November 1. See afsb.org/programs/art-gallery.