(Modern Heart)
Sandi Kaye
Found 05/2015, Goodwill (South 1st and Slaughter)

Drawing from color field art and the bold colors of pop art, (Modern Heart) pulls the subject into a stylized abstraction. The primary subject exists in a white field that resembles a comic strip frame. Her facial features are obscured by a dark field: her tears, the frail and wavy lines of her arms, and this dark color field add a feeling of weakness and depression. Perilously little of her heart is a red vital color: the majority is covered in what might be crazing lines and cracks, or a spiderweb design. It may be made of stone or ceramic, emphasizing the artificiality of her dress and the concealing purple masking her face.

In that context, the color fields at the right of the image become more organic and natural than the human subject. Softer rounded lines crowd the color fields.The yellow field suggests light streaming through a window at night, an urban setting, a melancholy note like that of “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”

The center of (Modern Heart) is the heart itself, itself a small color-field abstraction. Without another human subject in the image, the woman seems to offer her heart to an indifferent world of abstracted fields.  The heart hangs, solitary, in the white field, the object of her tears: it is central, and ultimately lonely. The busy and abstract image isolates the subject and emphasizes her alienation.