ANNETTE LEMIEUX by Harriet Zinnes as published in NY Arts April 2001, vol. 6, no. 4 Before attending a new show of the American artist Annette Lemieux the question may very well arise: what will this artist, so uncommitted to a single form, be showing now? Will it be paintings, sculptures of found objects, bronze sculptures, mixed media constructions, collages, drawings, photography, even various combinations of all of these? Perhaps the very title of Lemieux's new show at the McKee Gallery (745 Fifth Avenue, New York City, through Saturday, April 14, 2001), "'Scapes:" holds a clue to her own desire to "escape" from a signature style. On the more literal level, one realizes as one enters the gallery that "'Scapes" refers to landscapes, seascapes, and skyscapes. But these are not the landscapes of Monet or the skyscapes of a Kokoschka (now on view at the Marlborough Gallery). Lemieux's works are conceived by a very contemporary artist who is not content to delve only into her own subjectivity, to move her brush through gestures springing from the unconscious. Lemieux looks outside, at a world of an artist -observer who needs the help of materials outside her immediate hand, her immediate brush. So it is that Lemieux shows four murals in this exhibition that rely on photographs not only taken by the artist. There is the strangely composed, brilliantly colored, rather scary "Fall 2000" based on a photograph taken by the filmmaker Ross McElwee of Lemieux lying over a huge tree stump with hair as violently red as the violent storm that has thrown her. Yet it has been created out of a calm water-based ink on muslin (a favorite material in this exhibition) on wood that is 73 x 50 x 12 inches. "Walking on Water Revisited 2000," also on muslin, is a photograph taken by Alberto Balestrieri that later was reworked by Lemieux, which we are told, was Lemieux's "de-installing her Charles River piece in Boston." One of the more beguiling murals in the exhibition is "4 PM (Crows) 2000" that is a large photographic mural (is the photograph taken by the artist?) on sheer material that gently sways back and forth as a result of the small floor fan blowing on it. We are no longer watching an art object in a gallery but are being drawn to the force of birds flying together in mysterious but familiar universal space. The movement created by the almost hidden fan near the other murals is characteristic of the artist, who even in a still photograph creates a sense of life's constant activities. Nothing is seemingly at rest. "Lily," a photograph of a woman's back emphasizes her head of hair that is covered with colorful butterfly hairpins. Life is not motionless even when the head is still. The images shown in the exhibition whether derived from photographs or not are very much the artist's own, something very similar to what Virginia Woolf once wrote come from "the loose drifting material of life," or perhaps are the result of Lemieux's determination, as she wrote in 1995, to make "new rules for myself The new photographs ... are those moments in life that you capture. They are not staged. The images are more personal, coming from my garden, or snorkeling, or running into a child/neighbor with a fantastic hairdo. The image creates the idea." If image has mattered to the artist, it has made for a very special exhibition.