 Caroline Golden | The Watch Cat 27x20inches | collage on paper |
Artists spend quite a substantial amount of time generating all sorts of illusions, whether purely pictorial (think Renaissance perspective) or not (in the egotistical sense, saying, "I'm very important, and so is my work"). The artworld is a place inhabited by the many ghosts of maya, although it does not often encourage much in the way of "piercing the veil" of the illusion in the quest for enlightenment.
The double-edged sword of maya—the illusory pleasures it provides, alongside the pain and ultimately the positive growth that it can engender—is something that generates the power of art, tapping into the fundamental processes of identification and differentiation that it regulates. To the Hindu mind, it is an illusion that I am radically separated from you, while the reality lies in the fact that the Self is in reality One. Art, which in some instances presents a purely illusory reality, can also serve to raise consciousness of this falsely double existence.
A group show opening this month at Carrie Haddad Gallery in Hudson, called "Almost Real," raises this sort of question in a number of ways, at turns whimsical or sober, on a delicate or enormous scale, depending upon the artist concerned.
Innovative jewelry maker Gillie Holmes turns her attention to altering 19th-century tintype portraits of stiffly posed gentlemen, framing their severe faces with haloes of rhinestones embedded in the surface of the image, literally "making light" of them. Something about the contrast between the stubborn reality of the original photograph and its lighthearted desecration opens the whole experience to a new, humor-driven level of questioning.
Ann Getsinger explains her experience of painting as "having a door open somewhere inside my head that lets the literal world blend with the dream world, imagination, memory, and intuition," as she paints surrealistically large, looming "portraits" of vegetables. Caroline Golden is represented here by a large collage series of storybook-style scenes with an Alice in Wonderland twist. The collages combine painted and drawn backdrops with passages of photographic imagery that confound perceptions of near and far, sometimes using a "real" photo-fragment as an abstract passage, cropping off others in ways that truncate their perspective or otherwise play on our normal expectations of illusionism. In both cases, Getsinger and Golden pull us in with immediately recognizable imagery, only to yank open a trap door under our routine expectations, dropping us into a completely different realm where things may (or may not) be real.
Just as dreams function to reveal truths otherwise buried in waking consciousness, so too can art tap into unreality to bring something new to light. The scumbled surfaces of David Konigsberg's oil paintings are populated by fuzzy, indistinct figures and objects that miraculously float or fly through a dreamlike space. Much less precisely rendered than Magritte, these painterly, surrealist-inspired works offer a similarly haunting vision of zero-gravity freedom.
Tina Sotis's paintings of nearly deserted streets and empty buildings combine the existential feel of Edward Hopper with the metaphysically warped perspectives of Giorgio de Chirico. Softened by an often overcast, rainy-day light and gauzy, slightly out-of-focus edges, this is a kinder, gentler sort of philosophical painting, but one that definitely trades on our emotional projections into its abstract presentation of space and color. The places themselves aren't real, but our engagement with them definitely is.
In quite a different key, and in contrast with the purely imagined realities presented in the Carrie Haddad show, is the stark yet deeply emotional reality presented by an exhibition that has just closed at Deep Listening Space in Kingston. Four years ago photographer Jone Miller found herself captivated by a photograph she saw in an exhibit at the United States Holocaust Museum, and has spent the intervening time trying to track down the specifics of the life and death of Alexander K., a Dutch Jew who, due to a skeletal disease contracted in his youth, appeared to be a dwarf and who was ultimately killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria on January 27, 1943.
The exhibition, "Journey to KZ-Mauthausen: In Search of Mr. Alexander K.," documents Miller's journey in search of this man and the many people it brought her into contact with—dozens of camp survivors, historians, concentration camp memorial site guards, and kindred spirits who for one reason or another have felt a similar compulsion to remember, to attempt to comprehend, the awful events of the Third Reich. Retracing Mr. K.'s fateful path—from Amsterdam and the Amersfoort transit camp in Holland, to Poznan, Krakow, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Plaszow in Poland, to Terezin in the Czech Republic—Miller finally arrived at Mauthausen, the Austrian camp where thousands of prisoners were worked to death in the granite quarries, where the mute stones remain as the sole eyewitnesses to all that took place there.
Her starkly beautiful black-and-white photographs of these places serve as phantom images, even as they record real people and locations. What was real about this man's life, in the end? The fact that a few photographs remain of him, and little else? Or is there something deeper to be found in the emotional resonance of Miller's travels, crossing and re-crossing the paths traversed by so many others in those terrible years? The very real suffering and injustice experienced by Mr. K. and the others seems now to be just an illusion...but in opening myself to Miller's images and the passages from her journals that accompanied them, I found it impossible to distance myself from that punishing reality. Just as the struggle to cast off the illusory veil of maya is at once difficult and necessary, so it is when dancing with the ghosts of Auschwitz and Mauthausen.