Chicken Little as metaphor for 9/11

Art Review

Painter Chunn captures fear with some humor

December 03, 2011|By Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

Panel details from Nancy Chunns Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear at… (ronald feldman fine arts,…)

NANCY CHUNN: Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear

through April 15

JEREMY DELLER: Manchester Tracks

through May 6

At: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 224 Benefit St., Providence. 401-454-6500, www.risdmuseum.org

PROVIDENCE - Painter Nancy Chunn is a news junkie who has admitted to ranting at her television set. Her comic, sprawling, poppy, and dire installation of paintings at the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design, “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear,’’ springs from her post-Sept. 11 examination of the aura of panic that dominated the last decade.

This is a big series of paintings, and it’s not even finished yet. Chunn has a history of making ambitious series. Every day in 1996, she painted visual commentary over the front page of The New York Times. She’s been working on ”Chicken Little” since 2004, and anticipates finishing it in 2014. It will comprise 11 multi-panel scenes, each a chapter in the chaotic, unfolding story of Chicken Little. Six are on view here.

Everyone knows Chicken Little is a nervous Nellie, set off by an acorn or a pebble hitting her in the noggin, and running frantically about telling all her friends that the sky is falling. In Chunn’s final chapter, which she has not yet made but has described, the jittery protagonist will land a job as an anchor at Fox News, elevating her fear mongering to terrific heights.

Chunn paints Chicken Little, and her cronies Turkey Lurkey, Loosey Goosey, and the rest, crisply in flat, bright colors, the way they might appear in a cartoon or comic book. And, as in a comic book, certain panels telescope in on details, while others give us wide, bustling shots.

The experience of viewing this immersive installation is nothing like reading a book. There are no less than 38 panels in a given chapter, and some number in the 60s. Each chapter is mounted against a bubble of color painted on the wall, which gives order to the overarching narrative. But the individual panels, while arrayed with a clear spatial sense of the story, read almost kaleidoscopically all over that bubble, bouncing the eye this way and that in a manner that echoes Chicken Little’s own darting, panicked glances.

Our querulous heroine goes from the garden, where a falling television (one of Chunn’s iconic symbols) knocks her on the head, to a bathroom filled with hazards - electrical devices, puddles, tumbling flower pots, an alligator in the toilet - and on to the kitchen, with all its terrors, and the bedroom. There, in a disarray, she tugs the label off her mattress and is promptly arrested and carted off to Rikers Island.