Jayne County is an artist whose biography is so substantial, it threatens to speak over her actual work as a performer, musician, and painter. Her paintings have received newfound acclaim after being exhibited in New York City and Lexington, Kentucky, the latter show organized by Daniel Fuller at Institute 193. Fuller returns to curate County’s current exhibition at Emory University’s Visual Arts Gallery, Jayne County’s Electric Dreams—a strange homecoming for one of Georgia’s most prolific counter cultural icons.
County’s emphasis on dreams is realized through a selection of nocturnal tableaus, giving the illusion of looking into the night through interior windows. Certain scenes are more familiar, albeit rendered askew through careful details: psychedelic smoke stacks come out of several houses, phallic mushrooms sprout from the grass, a feline angel hovers in the sky. County’s accompanying statement repeatedly points towards these visions as an almost divine inspiration, situating her among an important canon of artists, including Lonnie Holley and Howard Finster. County has more in common with both artists’ flamboyant tendencies, ignoring the patina of their beloved, found objects. Instead, she uses an exclusive palette of fluorescent paint markers and gel pens on smooth matte black canvas. The exhibition’s wall labels betray the complexity of the medium, each listed plainly as “acrylic and marker on canvas.”
More important than the initial medium is County’s application, one which is both precise and gestural. There is an easy subversion in depicting strange scenes in vibrant technicolor, assuming the two impulses somehow contradict. Instead, County’s medium is integral to understanding the drawings. The repeated Trojan Horse motif is the most telling, a vehicle for disguise drawn in bright colors and patterns. The horses’ sex organs are also displayed, mostly penises. This suggests the complexity of outer signifiers, the even more complex inner world within, and the failure of such a strict and separate binary. It is tempting to analyze each motif, though such a Jungian approach feels tedious to both the work and the artist. As interested as I am in evaluating the paintings without County’s biography in mind, the narratives are repeatedly informed by the artist’s own mythology, namely her time in New York’s 1970s avant-garde. County moved to the city in 1968 from Dallas, Georgia and quickly became enmeshed in the city through both her own work and appearing in others’ work, often as a performer.
Knowing this doesn’t always decode the images; for example, Andy Warhol appears split into two caricatures labeled “War” and “Hol” at the base of a cross in Candy’s Nightmare (2024). County’s relationship to Warhol as an actor and The Factory affiliate in the 1970s contributes little understanding beyond initial recognition. More helpful is the painting’s other subject, County’s New York City peer and fellow actress Candy Darling, who is shown crucified on a penis cross. Darling would pass in 1979 from lymphoma, though her legacy has been visible in the widely circulated image of her in the hospital taken by Peter Hujar and more recently the subject of a long gestating biopic. There’s a dark humor to County’s depiction, a literal nightmare, though Darling is not the only crucified femme. Maybe these paintings should be taken at face value as dreams, an external processing rather than a revealing diagnosis.
