Zoë Stiler's solo show 'The River, The Cyclone, and Other Stories' is haunting and enchanting

TAOS — It’s hard to make good narrative paintings of spirit-haunted, Jungian landscapes, and very easy to make bad ones. What separates a psychologically meaningful archetype from a pretentious cliche? When does a luminous landscape devolve from the deeply felt presence of a J.M.W. Turner or a Jake Berthot into the cringeworthy kitsch of a Thomas Kinkade? Why do Odilon Redon’s magical landscapes still frighten and enchant us, while other artists’ dreamscapes bore us to tears? I don’t know. But Zoë Stiler makes great paintings, and “The River, The Cyclone, and Other Stories,” for all its fabulist myth-making, is as real as it gets.

Stiler works with the certitude and conviction of an artist driven by an inner vision and utterly unconcerned with art world trends. While not entirely self-taught — she briefly attended one of the nation’s top-ranked art colleges, the Rhode Island School of Design, and did a residency at the Vermont Studio Center — Stiler does live and work in an off-grid, solar-powered home in the middle of a sagebrush mesa in rural New Mexico. And she has spent the past three decades quietly building an incredible body of work with almost no institutional recognition or support — until now.

Kudos to Ari Myers, owner of The Valley in Taos, for taking a risk on an aesthetically mature but unknown artist. I doubt she’ll remain unknown for long.

When viewing Stiler’s paintings, what I notice first are the abstract forms and patterns. Her subjects emerge almost as afterimages — an effect that can be quite eerie. In “The Coyotes” (2019), for instance, I am struck by a series of jagged, wavy forms that might be leaves or desert grasses — or are they rooster feathers? Twilight-hued, they shift from greenish-brown to reddish-brown, with undertones of purple and magenta. Then, other jagged, wavy forms come into view: duck wings? It takes a few seconds more for my brain to register the faces of the coyotes, with their angular muzzles, piercing eyes and bloody teeth. Seeing them suddenly and all at once has the impact of a horror movie jump-scare. After that, I see the decapitated birds.

Just as Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” used fragmentation to capture the chaos of war, Stiler’s fragmented composition captures the terror and confusion of a real-life incident she witnessed one night when a pack of wild coyotes attacked and killed the chickens and ducks in her yard. The figures in “Guernica” are delineated by clear outlines, but those in Stiler’s “The Coyotes” come in and out of focus, emerging like nocturnal hallucinations — hauntingly beautiful, or beautifully haunting.

The hallucinatory effect is even stronger in “Nature’s Patterns” (2022), where stylized tree branches, root structures, waves, wind, skeletons and clusters of blood vessels overlap to form a nightmarish arboreal landscape that breathes and pulses with the rhythms of life and death. The formal similarities between blood vessels, tree branches and dripping paint have been explored by other artists but seldom in such a spellbinding way. Stiler’s twiggy, veiny tendrils ensnare us in their thickets and don’t let go.

Shadows become ghostly hands. A face — oddly serene — materializes among the branches. Skeleton parts trickle into a river of corpses as disturbing as the decomposing bodies of the Tibetan Lukhang murals. But, like those Buddhist images, Stiler’s skeletons are just one part of a larger picture of cosmic impermanence, and whether we see “Nature’s Patterns” as horrific, beatific or both, probably depends on how comfortable we are with our own mortality. But Stiler doesn’t shield us from the darkness.

The cyclone of Stiler’s exhibition title refers to an eight-foot illuminated hanging sculpture, “Cyclone” (2014-2024), which she spent ten years slowly building out of bailing wire, paper, pressed flowers and other materials. “Cyclone,” with its swirling whorls, is the largest and most dramatic of three illuminated sculptures in the show.

“Spirit Ship” (2019) is perhaps an even more evocative one. The hull of the ship, which Stiler made from locally-sourced micaceous clay, is composed of open-mouthed faces — perhaps the spirits of dead sailors — who emerge from the larger form like the hallucinatory faces in her paintings. “Spirit Ship” reminds me of West African Epa masks, which also include smaller attendant figures within larger sculptural forms. Not that there’s any cultural or historical connection there, but the spiritual sincerity of Stiler’s work invites such comparisons. It has a shamanic presence that’s rare in contemporary art. The closest comparison might be Wangechi Mutu, or, if we go back a few generations, Max Ernst.

The psychological intensity of Stiler’s work, combined with its dreamlike, fantastical elements and her totemic use of birds and animals, certainly reminds me of Ernst. But when I met Stiler at the opening and asked her about Ernst, she said, “I don’t think I’ve been influenced by anyone.”

Coming from any other artist, that probably would have sounded pompous. But I could tell she was simply being honest. After all, an artist doesn’t live in an off-grid home for decades, rarely showing their work, if they’re primarily concerned with their place in art history.

Stiler’s paintings form their own reality — a sui generis universe born from the New Mexican mesa and the artist’s own spirit-haunted visions, both wondrous and terrifying.

Zoë Stiler's solo show 'The River, The Cyclone, and Other Stories' is haunting and enchanting