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Jeff Bark’s new images are clearly crying out for psychoanalysis. The 61-year-old photographer has spent decades alternating between commercial imagery and more artistic work, honing a style of relaxed, sophisticated staged pictures that might be described as “dark rococo.” His work was erotic and decadent, but largely devoid of personality. While his latest project, “Drunken Dad,” represents a move toward autobiographical folklore, Bark told me one day this winter, in his home and studio in upstate New York, “When I showed it, even my closest friends would ask, ‘Did something happen to you when you were a kid?’ ”
It’s clear where they come from. The works in Drunken Dad are almost always dark and brooding, exuding an ominous scent of death or an uneasy sense of desolation that recalls the rural creepiness of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. There are rotting, weed-choked still lifes that evoke the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch masters; cold landscapes of forgotten, abandoned towns; and unsettling allegorical portraits of a waxen-faced male model dressed, for example, in a pilgrim’s hat and ankle pants, or as a down-on-his-luck cowboy whose fancy fringed suit might suggest that he owns a used-car lot or a cheap casino. The project is also full of vivid metaphors for broken American dreams: a white wooden house burned to the ground; a giant discarded cross amid a thicket of saplings; an American flag lodged in a plastic swan planter, surrounded by fresh snow and crushed cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon. His painting of an eerily lifeless, glass-eyed eagle, solemnly framed as if it were meant to adorn a postage stamp, is a sad testament to our zombified ideals. When he was young, Bark says, he was fascinated by Norman Rockwell’s kitschy visions of America. Now one of his favorite artists is Paul McCarthy, the scatological illusionist of the national id.
Sourse: newyorker.com
