The New Yorker:

Jeff Bark’s elaborately composed scenes channel sundered American fantasies. They also function as personal folklore.

By Chris Wiley

The new pictures by Jeff Bark beg to be psychoanalyzed. The sixty-one-year-old photographer spent decades shuffling between making commercial images and more gallery-specific fare, honing a style of louche, opulent staged tableaux that we might call “dark rococo.” The work was sexy and decadent but largely impersonal. His most recent project, “Drunk Dad,” by contrast, marks a move toward something like autobiographical folklore. One day this winter, at his home and studio in upstate New York, Bark told me, “As I’ve been showing it, even my best friends have been, like, ‘Did something happen to you as a kid?’ ”

You can see where they’re coming from. The pictures in “Drunk Dad” are almost universally baleful and brooding, emanating the creeping stink of death or a discomfiting sense of the run-down rural uncanny right out of David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.” There are rotting, weedy still lifes that recall the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch masters; chilly nowheresville landscapes of forgotten, blighted towns; and creepy allegorical portraits of a waxen-faced male model dressed in, for example, a pilgrim hat, with his pants around his ankles, or as an ersatz cowboy whose fancy-fringed suit suggests that he might be the owner of a used-car lot or a low-rent casino. The series also features plenty of on-the-nose metaphors for sundered American dreams: a white clapboard house consumed by fire; a monumental discarded cross in a thicket of saplings; an American flag stuck in a plastic-swan planter, ringed with fresh snow and crumpled cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. His picture of an eerily lifeless, glassy-eyed eagle, framed triumphantly as if it were meant to adorn a postage stamp, provides a bathetic testament to our zombified ideals. When Bark was young, he said, he loved Norman Rockwell’s kitschy Americana visions. Now one of his favorite artists is Paul McCarthy, a scatological conjuror of the national id.

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