Double Take   by Susie Kalil 

A child is born.  A friend is lost or found.  Out of nowhere comes a sense of peace or foreboding.  The moment of revelation is also inevitably the moment of tragedy.  We are awakened by a dream. 

It's been said that we never really forget anything, and all our pasts lie deep within us somewhere waiting for a stray sight or smell to bring them to the surface again.  But memory is more than looking back to a time that is no longer.  It is a looking out into another kind of time where everything continues to grow and change with the life that is in it still.  Vanished faces and voices.  The people we loved.  The people who loved us.  It is for some clue to where we are going that we search through where we have been.  Perhaps we try to find something that at the time we had somehow missed, perhaps an answer to questions we hadn’t known how to see. 

A "doubletake" suggests a delayed reaction to a surprising situation.  In this particular context, however, it also entails recognition and reinvestment of significance that might otherwise have been overlooked or taken for granted.  The ten artists of Double Take simultaneously challenge our notions of transcendence and our foothold on this earth.  Their varied works can be described as puzzling, startling, disturbing, unbalancing, and spellbinding.  Everything looks so familiar, yet its meaning eludes us or crosses over into areas that are charged with the paradox of uncharted territory.  Most of these artists are in their fifties; a few are coming off the backside of middle age.  They are risk takers, venturesome in their attempts to forge a distinctive language during years of relative isolation.  By focusing on artists who have been determined to follow their own light, the show examines the urgency and raw passion, the unabashed curiosity and searching quality that has taken them through the ebbs and flows. 

Their images tap into memories and emotions – about darkness, strange places and the wonder of that which attracts and frightens us for reasons unknown.  As such, they reveal the artists to have been vulnerably exposed to the transformative events of an engaged human life.  The art becomes a spiritual endeavor which delves into the essence of being.  Each work is made in such a way as to encourage closeup and distant viewing, tactile and visual experience and both physical and emotional involvement.  From the outset, the art lays bare basic links between the human body, human existence and nature.  Some works investigate notions of identity and metamorphosis, a kind of reassembling of the spirit, the mind, the body and the object itself.  Others suggest a role for art in the world and a set of problems for it to address, works that bring with them a sense of contingency, of quirks and commotions of our daily lives.  All of the works, however, exude an overwhelming sense of desperation or obsession; it's as if they had to be made according to a deeply personal urge or interior force.  Of vital concern is not only the difference between stasis and change, but a much deeper and older set of oppositions between the private and the public, between the self and the world at large, between hidden obsessions and our daily passage with one another.  And those oppositions seem to make less sense every day. 

We rely on an inner compass to keep us on track, even though the destination becomes increasingly difficult to articulate.  Accordingly, these artists endeavor to observe human foible and speculate on the role that memory plays in underwriting our sense of choice and direction in our lives.  All in all, Double Take points up the translation of the seen into the unseen, of the world into ourselves.  The show is also a statement about consciousness, about the way we transform and internalize perception into being, into who we are.  Confronting these works, we sense the recurrent longing for a return to something more deeply rooted, to something seemingly earlier and hence primal. 

Significantly, the show represents an affirmation of the belief that the world is filll of majesty and mystery and worthy of scrutiny.  The issue, nevertheless, is one of how we pay attention to things in the world.  Within Buddhist meditation there is a persistent focus on cultivating one's capacity to be present with things as they are, to cultivate an ability to see each thing, each being, each moment as though for the first time and to recognize those various states of consciousness.  As life speeds up and further complicates our experience we should value any opportunity to be still, to let the mind rest, to allow seeing to take place.  The process of looking at occurs all the time.  But true seeing is rare.  It asks for the cultivation of intimate ways of being in the world, for a set of standards and customs that give the heart the emotional affinity it requires and the skin the brush with real things it craves.  To know things in this way we have to hold them close, visit them in their flesh, become familiar with their past. 

Among the furniture and boxes of her late mother's house, Dee Wolff found the old biscuit tin that contained a precious button collection.  As a child, she would pry open the tin, launching a burst of colorful buttons all over the room.  Out of her extreme grief, Wolff has created the Button Box Memories, a series of ink drawings that serves as a meditation on her mother's passing and on death itself.  The death of someone close acquaints us with the mysteries of the underworld, then sends us back into life, never to be the same again.  Utilizing a range of spiritual symbols –  crosses, fish, baskets, ladders, vessels, wrapped bodies, sailing ships – Wolff constructs a compelling world, rich with primal associations.  For her, the ocean is both a place – a mobile surface full of portents, clues and meanings – as well as empty space.  The relevance of the imagery may be puzzling, but we recognize Wolff’s assertion that the soul's transport has cosmic significance. 

Indeed, the concept of "mapping" seems an appropriate metaphor to this particular group of works for the way our experience of the world is implicated in a complex web of partial structures and open-ended systems.  Mapping refers to related modes of charting, diagramming, of taking the measure of the world.  Mapping is taken to mean the possibility of restaging and giving life to displaced and repressed histories.  But it also challenges operational definitions of reality, suggesting that much can be gained by imagining an unbounded world in which spiritual and emotional recognitions merge.  No mysteries are more profound and confusing than loss, suffering, illness and death.  Wolff's ritualistic mode of expression suggests a distinct compulsiveness, a fusion of edgy uncertainty with a firm certitude, and the need to grasp and anchor the ephemeral.  Wolff's struggle isn’t merely to achieve a creative act through drawing; rather hers is a genuine reflection of the innermost soul through fears, terrors, loves and obsessions.  It is as if mark-making connects her to the very nerve of her universe by becoming the conduit of her messages, her visions. 

In our frantic, noisy, alienated culture we can easily overlook the inestimable value of things close at hand.  Intimacy is not only the emotional closeness between people but also a preference for a more immediate encounter with the things of nature.  What does it mean to be part of all forms of life?  That there are traces of ourselves in plants, animals and minerals, tenacious traces of what we once were and shall become?  Honey Harrison's prismacolor drawings investigate the world rather than represent it, reminding us of seasonal change, transformation and the transcience of existence.  Harrison treats segments of landscape – lush blue grasses, monolithic pine trees – as abstract elements to be tinkered with and manipulated, exaggerated and condensed.  The palpable space these drawings create is a function of the time essential to our perception of them.  Images read as sharp, geometric fields from a distance; they soften and lose focus at closer range, making us conscious of nature as metaphor for the internal journey we take in life.  Harrison’s high density mark-making results in a visual tension between the particular and the whole.  Although the work is highly structured, it appears to be in a state of perpetual vibration.  Like the landscape, ever in flux yet soothing in its permanence, Harrison’s work invokes a continuous play of opposites: between inner and outer worlds, between clarity and obscurity, between change and constancy. 

Similarly, Bobbye Bennett's rigorous abstractions explore organic shape as symbolic content in psychically-charged spatial contexts.  Her hotly colored, mixed media works on paper seem anxiously suspended between spirituality and doubt, balance and chaos.  It is difficult to find a quiet passage in the"tree trunks;" rather there is constant turbulent flux.  Firey oranges and honey-toned auras bump up against green vegetal forms and purple spiky cartilage.  The overwhelming content is one of ambiguity, mystery and the enigma of equivocal forces.  Bennett’s trees are wholly caught up in the instability of shifting references, in the intensity of acute perceptions, and in the complex magic of cognition.  As such, they operate in a netherworld of multiplicity and simultaneity, effecting a visual energy that grabs our eye and sustains our gaze.  We see them as living organisms that exist in our own environment, and rely upon the same air, earth and water for survival.  They seemingly pulse with tension between matter and antimatter, breathing and smoldering as if in ecstatic bursts of erotic energy.  To be sure, everything seems willed rather than calculated.  Her wild gestures unfurl areas of serpentine circuitry and sinew that glow like cellular formation in the process of growing under a microscope.  They are part of the flow of natural forces colliding, separating, splitting apart and jostling together. 

In Pam Johnson's conte drawings, biomorphic forms mutate into autonomous organisms that cluster alongside other organic forms or gently bump up against dark membrane-like fields that are themselves both visceral and atmospheric.  Bulbous, sack-like shapes swing pendulously from whiplike tentacles resembling umbilical cords or veins.  Johnson’s fiercely scrubbed, gestural line is of great beauty and intensity.  It broadens out into areas of velvety black, suggesting a dialectic between fight and darkness, form and void, the material and immaterial world.  The hybrid forms are like parts of a self pursuing the circuitous path of intuition, and thereby seeking its own center of gravity, its own inner and outer limitations.  The linear elements are applied and then refined; they swell into subtly colored shapes, which are then pared back and coaxed into newly found volumes.  The vulnerability and ambiguity of these clustered forms and their sexual suggestiveness create a seductive atmospheric depth that draws us in. 

Indeed, Johnson's relentless perfection of technique, her unabashed sensuality and attention to process – to gesture and traces of the hand – give her works a tactile presence, while her enigmatic imagery reaches down to the primitive and atavistic.  By the same token, we perceive Johnson’s carved wood sculptures that dangle from vines as both strong and vulnerable, tentative and expansive.  Every alignment, every lyrical curve speaks of aesthetic decision.  This sense of deliberation is increased by her craftsmanly regard for surfaces.  In Strange Clusters, the horn, spira and fan shapes connect as voluptuous protrusions and ridges.  The forms huddle together for protection, touching one another at erotic points and even falling alongside the sensuous indentations.  In Johnson’s work, the relationship between surface and depth, outside and inside, the immediately visible and whatever lies beneath it take concrete shape.  Significantly, her art casts these relationships in terms of the human body, particularly where physical interaction and mental stimulation momentarily converge.  But the spores, embryos, cocoons and protozoa have also been lodged like tough shells deep in our souls.  They are of our inner world, shadowy forms that find their correspondences outside in nature, in the cosmos where everything that emerges also has its place. 

Ellen Berman glides her oil paints onto canvas, allowing their brushiness and weight to convey a sense of the material heft and ripeness of pears, figs, plums and eggplants contained in glazed ceramic bowls.  She bathes the still lifes in a golden light that passes over the fruits and vegetables much as the evening shadows overtake the late afternoon sun.  In all of the paintings, patches of vibrant pigment read simultaneously as light, form and material substance.  They seem both spartan and generous.  It's as if radiant energy has been collected between the modest and disciplined brushstrokes.  Each gesture, each nuance is an episode in a dialogue with the canvas – a dialogue in which the eye faces and takes in the visible facts of paint and canvas and the spatial readings built into them.  As such, they are close to a figurative tradition – not obviously in terms of subject or compositional hierarchies, but in terms of spaces filled with forms. 

The still life genre, of course, is a mode often associated with women because of its closeness to the kitchen.  Even so, Berman aims to perceive the poetry, the spirituality and the mystery in all forms of relationships.  Looking at the artist's clusters of sectioned figs or taut-skinned eggplants facing opposite directions is to acknowledge that we are also like fruits living in tender bodies, strangers to our own existence.  Being human, being in the world, is to be constantly making our place in language, in consciousness, in imagination.  To that end, her still lifes are very strange and subtle works, full of calm, like light circulating in water.  At times, the objects become a charged field of their own energy, and when they meet, they give off brilliant sparks.  Behind Berman’s workday order of kitchen labor and food is an eroticism that manifests itself not only in the caressing of objects, the points at which they touch and graze each other, but more importantly, in her disruption of the world of mundane objects, in her making provisional all identities.  Accordingly, Berman’s still lifes have an elegiac quality.  The visceral, cut-open fig may suggest the theatrical nature of relationships, the cruelty and selfishness of the human heart, the inevitable blurring of love and pain.  Although Berman depicts her fruits in all their fleshy ripeness, we know they will quickly rot.  Bermarfs paintings remind us that the processes of birth, growth, maturity, decay and death are part of the terms of an organic life cycle. 

But growing up and old is not only a process rooted in our biological existence; it is also an experience, an incalculable series of events, moments and acts lived by an individual.  This experience, this passage through the maze of inner life composes our journey.  At its best, portraiture can capture a moment of life's passage, recording a particular subject at a revealing time.  The tension in a portrait between the particular and the generic often creates a kind of narrative in which we try to unravel the case history of a subject's life, even comparing it with recollections of our own.  Helen Orman's psychologically charged rendition of her grandmother and double portrait of her deceased sister as a baby are at once tough and emotional records of a genuine grappling with specific events that have marked the artist's life.  Pain Gone When Woke presents her grandmother as a young woman.  Her soft blue eyes, slight smile and waxlike complexion emit a haunting presence.  Collaged to the portrait are sections from her grandmother's diary, entries which record the days surrounding Orman's birth. 

The beauty of memory lies in its capacity for rendering detail, for paying homage to the senses and the richness of our existence.  But time dilutes and corrodes until there is nothing left to tell.  Whatever is remembered is what becomes reality.  Admittedly, the portrait is a way to keep Orman’s grandmother alive in memory, even as it blends issues of public and private, the confrontational and the voyeuristic.  The compelling resonance of her art is conveyed in large part through an evidence of hand that inflects both image and text with an equivalent of tenderness and tact.  What Orman reveals in fractured but often potent doses are the tenets by which society unconsciously defines itself, justifies its actions, and molds our very identities.  Orman’s grandmother still speaks and has a presence; we hear her voice in the words and phrases of her diary.  As we read her words and closely examine her face, we engage her personality and imagination.  We are present to her, as she presents herself to us. 

Similarly, Anstis Lundy's art-making serves as a psychologically empowering act that brings about a deeper understanding of human experience.  Her commitment to the precise rendering, the studied demarcation of sections of the natural world and the man-made has produced hauntingly beautiful watercolors of the mundane and unobtrusive.  Standing before her triptych of Wonderbread toasts, we gaze into the slices as we look into mirrors, to see ourselves.  For women, in particular, mirror-gazing is both necessary as a means of self-recognition and, with the passage of time, increasingly painful, as the disjunction between what is seen and what is remembered becomes more and more apparent. 

Each slice of toast – white, light brown and burnt – seemingly hovers on the paper as a minimal shape.  Moving among the three, however, brings to mind a wealth of associations: bread as the staple of life; the derogatory name-calling "white bread;" or the confrontational "you’re toast!"  Moreover, burnt toast is dry and crumbly, like shriveled skin.  And bread only lasts a few days.  When it becomes moldy, we simply dispose of it.  Yet Lundy's slices of toast are worlds in themselves, filled with scarlike striations, craterlike holes, crisp ridges and fluid passages of coppery-brown pigment.  These works have a dry, pale beauty and a trompe l'oeil trickiness that is both dazzling and obsessive.  Demanding a scanned, allover read, they leave us a little off balance, perhaps a little exposed.  What we are exposed to is universal: the vulnerability to outside blows of even the most loving human bonds, the way transcience makes a ghost out of everything that happens to us. 

Charlotte Cosgrove's small ink and prisma drawings summon forth the randomness of life, the uncertainty, even perversity of existence.  Nature is present and visible here, but still in hiding; it is simultaneously close and distant, encompassing and eluding.  Cartoony landscapes depict the idyllic streams, lakes, islands and wildlife surrounding the artist's summer home in Maine.  They're slice-of-life scenes with an optimism and sweetness that conceal shadowy secrets and stirring psychological undercurrents.  There's the feeling that the banal house and postcard-perfect nature scenes can turn into unfathomably dangerous places at a moment's notice.  A tranquil shore is ominously lined with pink podlike shapes.  The bow of a boat emerges out of nowhere like some mystical apparition.  Houses teeter and sway as if caught up in a seismic disturbance.  One abandoned house is ensnared by an electrifying pink force field.  Another is surrounded by mysterious orange tentacles. 

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection.  An entire past may come to dwell in a house.  Not only our memories, but the things we have seemingly forgotten are"housed." Our soul is an abode.  The old saying:"We bring our lairs with us" has many variations.  The house, like fire and water, permits us to recall glimmers of daydreams that illuminate the synthesis of immemorial and recollected.  Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home.  The house images are in us as much as we are in them.  Even so, Cosgrove shows that hurt, loss, darkness or death can flatten a house in seconds.  Her strange, discomfiting narratives capture, in flashes and flickers, the juncture of confusion and alienation, the portentous sense of time running out.

 Indeed, if death can strip away all surfaces and we are fated to live in death’s shadow, then by what guidelines are we to live?  Death is the great equalizer, uniting us across cultures.  A consciousness of the inevitability of death supposedly separates us from the animals, while the decay of our bodies mocks our desire for eternal life.  Sharon Kopriva's mummylike sculptures of church figures strike at the depths of psychic discomfort.  Her gothic brutality, religio-erotic fetishism and instinctual use of time-worn materials convey an unpleasant reminder of our own mortality.  In the Soul Tickler, a priest assembled from bone, fabric, found furniture parts, papier-mache and paint sits at an upright piano.  The keyboard he plays is composed of tiny figures.  Within the "body" of the piano and directly in front of the priest is a mystical portrayal of heaven and hell.  Kopriva paints an underworld of snakes and mythic beasts.  Luckier souls, however, are depicted as moving upward to a dreamy blue realm.  Overall, the tableau exudes a powerful theatricality that is rich with the kind of metaphorical layering Kopriva has habitually extracted from her materials and imagery.  Evoking messages of spiritual healing and cultural decay, the piece also aims to keep visionary energy alive, to fulfill the soul's need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things. 

By ritualizing life through the intimate and the familiar, Kopriva recovers an erased history and brings the necessary spectacle of mourning to the public sphere.  The world she portrays both embraces and represses the past – earthy, bodily, brutal; mythic, irrational and unsterile – the identification is linked to the pagan force that wells up through the cracks of Spanish Catholicism.  This dualism should itself be seen within the tradition that holds it as an archetypal and ever-changing metaphor of good and evil, spiritual redemption and damnation, knowledge and ignorance.  As such, the work constantly renews itself in our imagination.  Horror mingles with humor, the sacred with the profane, ideality with kitsch.  Significantly, Kopriva’s multilayered work forces us to look to our own souls without any spiritual props or lenses.  By doing so, we learn that faith comes not only from the spiritual life and high revelations, it also comes as an emanation from the depths, an utterly impersonal reality from the most personal place.

 Where does the light go when a candle is blown out?  The childlike question forces us to take notice of the metaphors that underlie our consciousness.  We understand existence to mean presence, and ceasing to exist as going away.  To recognize the metaphor is to recognize how we think – that is, to notice the conceptual framework of our conscious thought.  Our consciousness is our own, and we sense it as such.  It is experienced as a unique possession of individual human beings.  Where does the life go when a body dies?  Where are we before birth?  Perhaps life is a continuum and does not begin or end at some arbitrary point.  Lynn Randolph's triptych Surrender Rapt Liquefying asks us to be aware of our consciousness, our uniqueness.  Her paintings are energized with narrative possibilities that are as confrontational as they are ambiguous and open-ended.  Nothing is certain, save for the subtle reality of the lived body.  Yet Randolph’s enigmatic women seem to exist in another time and place, perhaps another realm.  Using the figure to represent inner states of being, she reinvents accepted definitions of self.  As if timelessly suspended in strange dreamlike states, their solid bodies and implied consciousness seem governed by intimate memories and primal instincts. 

In Surrender, a young woman’s head and neck have been cropped just below the throat line.  She aggressively arches her neck, relinquishing this most vulnerable body part to life.  For Rapt, the artist portrays an older woman in an embryonic sack, a kind of diaphanous soul wrap that may protect her on an astral journey.  Liquefying shows a middle age woman metamorphosing in water.  As she gracefully cups her hand in the precious liquid, the ripples, or spirit lines, radiate protective circles around her body.  From this distanced realism, the women project an imposing, emotionally expressive physicality.  Moreover, glowing sensuously in warm flesh tones, velvety blacks and iridescent blues, the smooth even sheens constitute charged grounds on which our fragile precariousness is played out.  We come from the unknown.  We appear on the earth, live here, feed off the earth, and eventually return into the unknown.  The oceans, of course, move in this rhythm; the tide comes in, turns, and goes back out again.  Each of these women is fully present to the sacred space within which the mystery unfolds.  Their experiences can be likened to the womb, a metaphor that also connects them to the home in which they live, move and have their being.  They remind us that we are a part of the millions of microorganisms reproducing and decomposing in the soil and are like the water of the planet that is in our bodies, the rivers and oceans.  By being fully present to the moment, we become open to the future pattern, to the not yet, to the unborn.  Have Randolph’s women returned to the origins, become their unborn selves?  Or are they in between life and death?  Either way, they are at home in the dark and the light, in suffering and in joy.  They are a part of the stillness and silence that is behind all things. 

At the core of Double Take is a persistence to be deeply moved by the extraordinary capacity for regeneration, the vital force within.  All of the works manifest an ecstatic feeling of personal wonder at nature and the human body, from which is derived a sense of spirituality independent of religious belief.  The ten artists do a doubletake in order to leave their marks on the world's skin.  They are marks of passage: intense, tightly coiled thoughts of rapture and pain, of rituals enacted and life lost, of time remembered and moments endured.

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