Seeing Double, Attleboro Museum

Greta Young, Back to Back Darting
Joseph Farbrook, Urban Skin Stereopticon

Curious. My son looked through this stereopticon and was delighted to find the image shifting visually in front of him. His remark of 'That's so cool' kind of sums up the exhibition that recently came down.
The Museum's invitation aptly read, "The Attleboro Arts Museum presents a national juried exhibition that will prompt you to think twice..." Kristina Durocher, the Curator of Collections at the Fitchburg Art Museum acted as juror, and has engaged the viewer with a wealth of ideas.
The grouping was sensitively hung with each piece cooperating with the next, scale varied from five or six inches to 15 feet or more. There was wood, iron, steel, photography, charcoal, oil stick, fabric, wire, screen,oil paint, acrylic, powder, gouache, watercolor...the range was enormous, as was the variety of processes.

I was drawn to the tiny space of repeated figures in Yana Payusova's 'Leash' which presented an altered religious icon of sorts pervading the gold painted surface. One is met



by questions of who these women may be, what is their relationship, and if it's one woman, why does she catch herself, trap herself, overpower herself? We move from curiosity and voyeurism to empathy and participation with the story, as the artist allows multiple endings (or beginnings) depending on your point of view.
Walking further, Devan and I are met by an over sized pair of pears entitled, (happily, tippily) Yellow Tandem by Elissa Freud. I'm reminded of the sing song jingle, 'Weebles wobble but they don't fall down'. Scale is fantastic, and we are in these two form's playground.



Melissa Bland's delicate, Premonition, is a beautifully rendered, pairing of rabbits who are strangely people-like...contrasting and aggressive in a gesture that both comes together and defies the other. They mesmerize as opposites, the handling so quiet, with the energy just under the surface in paws that might just push off and bound away from each other.



Caged Birds by Emile Lemakis is a similarly shallow, flattened space, squeezing us by the pressure of the picture plane and our expectations of three dimensions. This patterned work is rich with gold to black contrast and small, irregular circles, hypnotically insistent.



The edges of the cages shift and sway, providing a movement that caged birds are not allowed. Bitter sweet then, to have such lovely forms, boxed. Is there a connection between how we as humans might choose (or not choose) to move through space?

Air moves between and around the uneven screen piece by Jodi Colella, Undercurrent. Grand in scale but frail with all these holes, it evokes mystery, a skin of sorts, porous and vulnerable.



Devan and I would have touched this cellular, amoeba-like form and walked through it if allowed, entering another world, either micro or macroscopic. The light changed throughout the day, altering its play of shadow and light, air and closure.

He meandered towards a sculpted form he immediately recognized as a whale tail, and I came to a piece that appeared visually straightforward and pleasing in its mechanical precision, except it was not precise, white laying unevenly on iron scales, the lightness, beauty, and purity of powder, replaced by the anxiety of knowing it's medicine, but what kind? The kind that heals or destroys? Balance is gone in 'Bipolar', by Claudia Flynn and we are placed in the precarious position of understanding what we think we see, may not be what exists. How do we compare beauty to despair, or the high to the low as these scales lost their balance...and is it necessary, or do we absorb both the balance and lack as one part of the whole?



The images in the exhibition spoke poetically of human needs, both physical and internal.



They stretched ideas of what it is to make a visual statement, and what it is to communicate.



The work was perplexing and inventive, thoughtful and encouraging.



Small and large, there was a feast of diptychs and doubles:

Troy West's Mother Father Grandmother, Grandfather,

Joanne Read Cotter's sensitive Dance of the Honeybee, with it's layered, transparencies of silk and wax,



and Sally Erwing's

'The Twin Within', close-spaced, nestled image which was both warm and strangely cold.

The theme of Seeing Double was open to interpretation, but it seems in viewing the exhibition, that many artists touched on what it is to be human (even if you're a rabbit, or a goat)and they accomplished this through ideas of nestling, overlapping, pushing at and shoving away, and even simpler, standing side by side.


Annmarie Collette, Mervin and King


Susan Denniston's After Twenty Seven Years Grey might sound somber, may even evoke 'somber' with its quiet range of browns and blues, but there was a humility to this work with the conviction of simple shapes, close proximity, and the slightly re-aligned forms of echoing figures. The couple turned away, private shapes that allowed for standing close and star gazing after all the years of good and perhaps bad, together. The psychological loneliness of the colors was transformed by the figures dignity.



My diptych, Adam and Eve, shifts in its spacing, with Eve sometimes on the right and sometimes on the left and sometimes alone. It isn't a political or biblical or even feminist story, although it might be all of these,... it is a questioning of placement, of materials, of stories untold or told from one or the other's viewpoint, so in the end, left open, a little wounded but bound, a partnering and a history taken and adjusted from other histories.



Open stories are where you, the viewer are in the moment of viewing, in the process of uncovering, and in how you interpret time and space in those moments of looking.


Are we seeing ourselves mirrored in others? Whose breath is on that glass, yours, or hers or ours? There's a self awareness, an uncovering, and an echo, leaving a question mark in the air. The woman in the image is young, sensual, leaning in. It feels private and we have been allowed to enter that private world.

External, cultural references live in this show, opening hallways to what if. Michelle Acuff's sculpted piece is touch and gentle simultaneously from the tactile smoothness of wood chanes to the heavy metal presence of iron, from the lighter to the darker, and from their isolation even while as piles, they remain close.

Beverly Rippel's image is lush, painterly, designed to both compel and repel, with internal shapes that become decorative like the iron wrought gate of your home, so then, what is home, what do we protect? Who do we challenge?



Jennifer Anderson allows us to visually look inside and around ourselves in this 'slice' of her portrait that never quite lets us inside for all the transparent potential, squeezed as it is between to planes of plexi.



How do we live together in space? Visually, how do we interpret and share ideas?What visual communication expands and what contracts?
Some of the images in 'Seeing Double' spoke directly to the idea of twin, an idea of belonging so much together as to be almost inseparable. My mother is a twin and has spoken of the lack of barrier between her sister and herself, of feeling the other's joy or pain as physically as if you were in fact, the same being. What is it like to feel so deeply, to become part of something else? Tempting.
Art asks you to feel with your senses and pull it inside yourself. It asks you to interpret and allow, and it asks you to look with care.





This work was visually and emotionally satisfying. Perhaps it's the discovery of unfolding patterns, pathways before unseen, the rising and falling of space and the coming together of the whole that makes looking so worth the time.
Seeing twice... is Nice!