One of the paintings on display at Oeno Gallery’s Summering exhibition this month is the artist Deborah Root’s December in Oahu: a Dream of Victory (2022), pictured, a 36” tondo, or circular painting, suggesting a giant cruise ship porthole. It features two seniors on vacation in Hawaii. The imagery tells us they lived through WWII; Japanese bombers in the background bring to mind the attack on Pearl Harbour.

While the war is long past, and the subjects are on vacation, it lingers on in the consciousnesses of its damaged survivors. Their Hawaiian dream vacation is threaded with memories of Japanese Zeroes, looming over miniaturized Hawaiian dancers and sunbathing tourists.

Likewise, the painting’s present interrogates tourism as another form of warfare, one that invades other countries and reduces them to insignificance — they become places for wealthy white people to play, sunbathe and be entertained.

Root’s paintings foreground subjectivity. Memory and the sense of place are both shot through with displacement and alienation. While they explore the deeply personal and inward — places are depicted to echo and probe interiority, and to suggest experience not fully realized — at the same time nothing is secret. Rivalries, inner dissatisfactions, boredom, lack of interest, or anomie are right out in the open. Most striking is how the felt experience of a painting’s subjects is communicated to the viewer. Affect is made tangible, partly by Root’s use of vivid, colliding colours, partly by a real deftness around expression. 

The use of different planes within a painting fragments the experience it portrays while making it tangible.

In this way, Root’s work insists on intersubjectivity even as it explores estrangement, dissonance, and detachment. While discrete subjects occupy different planes, to suggest they are memories from a different time or another place, seeing things whole is the effect.

The viewer occupies a privileged position: we see from one of the various planes or perspectives available in a painting, and from all of them. That makes the experience of reading and apprehending one of these paintings deeply satisfying. They suggest everything can be put in its place by an attentive viewer, accounted for, understood — even if the memories are bad, the “vacation” not just an empty dream but a form of repetition. 

At the same time, there is a sense that the subjects inside the painting are trapped, unable to make sense of their fragmented and displaced experience.

Root is concerned with how war haunts the present. Her  paintings take on a dizzying array of different conflicts. While the particular war — Vietnam, or WWII, or something looming on the horizon — shifts and changes, the fact of war and its many aftermaths is everpresent. 

That makes Root’s work particularly appropriate for the moment.