THE GEOGRAPHY OF DISAPPEARING PLACES

A moving river represents both change and stasis, wandering far yet always staying in the same place. An unnamed and quietly influential river snakes its way through the mythic landscapes of Mona Lang's paintings.

At their very foundations, these works are landscapes: the panels that support the paintings are the bumpy, textured remnants of an old worktable. These surfaces are a palimpsest, their topography gradually formed and transformed by time: built up geologically by years of paint drippings, eroded down a bit by sanding, then built back up again with the accumulation of many more strata of brushed and scumbled paint, and finally washed over with lush, translucent glazes. Lang sawed the table into pieces to make these works, and its textured history informs the feel and content of the paintings. Like all landscapes, it contains stories. The events that have taken place on it over time have left their marks.

On these pocked, dripped-upon, multilayered surfaces, Lang has painted representations of mythical, melancholy landscapes, a waterway threading its way through all of them. As with Giorgio DiChirico's strange and empty cityscapes, one senses one has already met these places in a dream. The stories depicted in them are also familiar, reminiscent of tales we think we may have heard before. Perhaps they are pieces of one big story that has been sliced up just like the worktable. We glimpse a cross-section of it in each painting, and must fill in the rest from our own store of myth and memory. However, the myth depicted here, if it were it possible to hear it in full, would never really wrap up neatly, with, say, a slain dragon or a smooching prince, like a traditional fairy tale.

The long horizontal shapes of the paintings require us to walk alongside the characters on their journeys as we follow them across the sleepy expanses. The point of view shifts, sometimes within the same painting: We see sleeping beauty herself from above, but view her quiet river valley and leafless birch trees from the front, as the eye moves over and through the space, to the hills stretching out in the far distance. In into the woods, we are invited to take the red-hooded woman's point of view, and implicitly, to join her on her journey into the wilderness.

But most of the time our view is cinematic, the river and its shore stretched out across our field of vision, dwarfing the stalwart animals and humans who persevere along it. In untitled and verboten for example, this journey seems particularly long and grueling, and is perhaps a descent into the underworld, its border in the center of the painting guarded by ghostly heads, and its realm darker and even more spatially ambiguous than the land of the living.

The underlying landscape of the panels makes its presence known in the painted world above. Its knobby drips and lumps rise up into the picture plane, breaking the smooth two-dimensionality of the painted landscapes. The soft, atmospheric blue-greys, greens, and ochres of the land and sky are interrupted and contradicted by the tumultuous forms that seem to be moving about underneath them. Washes of dark red, rubbed into the crevices, help highlight this tension and add to the layered ambiguity.

Sometimes the undercurrent threatens to engulf the living creatures above: In tempest the drips have formed themselves into a storm, tossing the tiny red-clad creatures about as they dive into the water. Drips, painted water, and struggling swimmers become indistinguishable from one another. In many of Lang's paintings, the earth in places has almost entirely dissolved into drips, but the characters, still solid themselves and undaunted by the turgidity of their surroundings, press on.

Places we know and have journeyed through are always disappearing, dissolving into the unreliability of memory. Disappearing, too, are the uncharted places where we haven't been, the untrod corners of the earth to which we might ourselves disappear. These paintings evince a yearning for disappearing, changing, dissolving places, even as they assert the persistence of myth and memory, and a river's relentless movement, should we dare to follow it, into unexplored territory.