Summer Muse 1990

Editor: Ivan Eyre's "Summer Muse," painted in 1990, using acrylic on what I assume is canvas, presents a striking silhouette filled with landscape. It feels like a window, but also unsettling. How do you interpret this work, focusing perhaps on the materials and production? Curator: Considering Eyre's "Summer Muse" from a materialist lens invites us to analyze the act of painting itself, especially within its late 20th-century context. We see acrylic paint, a mass-produced material, used to depict a highly romanticized, almost pre-industrial landscape. This juxtaposition itself reveals much. What tension do you think Eyre is trying to explore between industrial production and idealized nature? Editor: So, the tension lies in the manufactured versus the natural? I hadn't thought of it that way. I was simply drawn to the dreamy quality of the scene contained within the figure. Curator: Exactly! The landscape inside, juxtaposed against the manufactured quality of the acrylic, brings out the idea of labor, too. Eyre uses the female figure not in isolation but literally crafted of/through labor. He almost questions: What *kind* of labor—mental? emotional?—does one exert in forming these images? Think about how Eyre is consuming and re-producing those idyllic landscapes. What is Eyre, as a laborer, actually doing? Editor: I suppose the work raises the question of what "nature" really is at the end of the 20th century – something painted, consumed, reproduced... It is a long way from simple "landscape". Curator: Precisely. The way the labor of art-making re-interprets 'Nature,' for consumption! Editor: This really challenges the surface appeal of the work, the idyllic view and forces you to ask harder questions about its making, meaning, and context. Curator: And ultimately the labor that produces not only images but our *ideas* of 'nature'.