By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

Kevin Nance visited a trio of Lexington galleries and sat down to write us a story that begins at Transylvania University's Morlan Gallery, winds through the Community Gallery in the Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, and ends up at the Lexington Art League. You're invited to tag along.

You don’t get to be an artist for half a century, as has Jack Girard, without leaving a substantial paper trail. A significant portion of that trail, much of it created without commercial considerations while teaching art at Transylvania University for the past 40 years or so — including mixed-media constructions, boxes, videos and a good number of what the gallery calls “forgotten” drawings — is now on view in “Jack Girard: 1975-Present,” a retrospective exhibit at the Morlan Gallery. It’s a mixed and motley show, short on obvious or overarching themes and long on odd juxtapositions and small, sharp surprises. It’s also, probably, the best way to appreciate this sly, subtly political artist who, though now retired, continues to make and exhibit new work that’s always worth looking at. 

The paper trail here begins with a series of highly revealing, self-generated wall texts that shed a dappled sort of light on his process and output. (This in itself is a treat. How many teaching artists do you know who are capable of writing, articulately and without a trace of academic art-speak, about their own work? Probably not many.) If we take the artist at his word, he approaches each piece without much forethought, “having no preconceived notion of outcomes. Sometimes I place a couple of strong, disassociated images on a page and work to discover any relationship they might have with each other. Other times I just start making marks. I’m in the backseat either way and without much of a map.” There’s a certain caginess in this statement, a kind of plausible deniability; it’s as if Girard doesn’t want to be held accountable for the content of his art, since after all, he wasn’t the driver. There is such a thing as a backseat driver, of course, and those initial images and marks didn’t come from nowhere.

Girard’s restless, questing mind is on full display in the show’s centerpiece, an entire wall full of untitled drawn and/or painted works on paper. They share certain characteristics, including an interest in human faces and forms, often at least partly obscured, along with a haunted sense of the disconnectedness and alienation inherent in American society and culture. Most of these pieces feature copious negative space, as if his search for the relationships within disparate elements has ended without apparent success. Not that that appears to bother him; as his wall texts reveal, he’s always on guard against what he calls “overthinking.” One of his governing principles seems to be to make the work and let the viewer figure it out — or not. 

Here goes, up to a point: As Girard explains in a wall text, he was raised as an Army brat, the family moving from one location to another, which may explain why he often seems to choose images that express transience, uprootedness, life on the move, maybe on the run. The most arresting single image on the wall shows a man driving what might be a car, his eyes hidden behind dark shades, his face stern, his fingers gripping the wheel with grim determination and no hint of pleasure. Girard also says that in his youth he came to reject military culture, which informs my reading of another piece, in which a man in an Army uniform appears to be standing (marching?) shoulder to shoulder with a Ku Klux Klansman in full regalia. This image, part of a collage that also  shows floral wallpaper and three electrical outlets, blooms in my mind to refer to varieties of racism and totalitarianism and how they were (and are) pumped into American homes along with electricity and running water.

On another wall, we find the image of a young nude woman on what might be a pedestal or a cross (or perhaps both), while beneath her, in a separate but perhaps related image, is a fetus, which lends itself to any number of interpretations ranging from the celebratory to the ominous. As the late Lexington artist, gallerist and critic Ann Tower noted in a long-ago Lexington Herald-Leader essay posted on a separate wall, Girard is interested in the condition of women in American society, in particular the corrosive effects of sexism and misogyny. That seems most evident, elsewhere in the gallery, in an untitled pair of riveting images of women in which their bodies are both sexualized and partially dismembered. One of their faces seems to have been flayed, while the other woman, as if to drive the point home, poses in front of a target.

A couple of mixed-media constructions — both of which benefit greatly from the artist’s accompanying texts — are notable for their macabre and/or satirical qualities. In “Family,” which seems to take its eclectic cues from Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg, members of a clan are represented by disjointed schoolbook texts, a fish in a display case, clocks, long rubber gloves of the sort a taxidermist might wear, a long blond wig (possibly made of horse hair) and the preserved carcass of a small animal. This iteration of the piece now strikes the artist as “more isolated and internalized” than its original version, “More lonely.” A few feet away, “Faith Meets Reason Under the Bigtop,” a new version of an earlier installation featuring a disheveled, ringmaster-like groundhog with a necktie and an evocative tuft of wispy yellow hair, is effortlessly hilarious. “Given the recent U.S. election,” Girard writes, “I sensed this sort of resurrection was appropriate.”