Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts™
State College, Pennsylvania

July 10-13, 2008 ~ Children's Day is July 9, 2008

IMAGES 2008 :: Essay by Images 2008 Juror Dinah Ryan

What We Hang on the Walls

And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love? -- Walt Whitman
from “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”

There are, I think, two ways of looking at art: it either adorns human experience or authenticates it. These different views swell into the intricate network of theories that comprise the creative and critical debate over art’s significance, and compelling works of art almost inevitably support them both. But in the end, the question of value comes down to an essential choice between art’s beauty and its utility.

Given the technical facility and appeal of the works in Images 2008, it’s tempting to primarily consider their aesthetic success, especially with their diverse subjects and media. The plaintive question Walt Whitman posed in “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his elegy for Abraham Lincoln that inspired the content and title for Nancy Brassington’s Lilacs for Lincoln, suggests another possibility. It implies that adornment exists in the service of memory, affection, loss, hope, place, or purpose. At this particularly high stakes moment – with the protracted war in Iraq, volatile economy, fragile environment, escalating global famine, and an imminent and fascinating presidential election that promises to underscore differing views about their potential solutions – it seems more to the point to consider these works in terms of the way in which they either frame “the human project” in fresh ways or reaffirm familiar but crucial perceptions.

The severe symmetry of Lilacs for Lincoln has both the orderliness of public monuments and a homely tidiness. Its central plane, a table covered with a lilac-patterned cloth, tilts incongruously toward a solitary, distant tree visible through a window flanked by an image of Lincoln and one of freed slaves. By painting objects redolent with a kind of bleak familiarity the artist yokes the private self and communal events.

Familiarity in this sense, of comprehension and discernment, marks a number of the works in Images 2008. The swimming child in Nancy Palfey’s drawing, Sarah, is suffused in dappled light. The artist has adroitly rendered light’s coalition with water. Her subject’s expression is so frank and bright that the drawing transcends facility to communicate a child’s unselfconscious immediacy.

A number of artists in the exhibition convey psychologically complex subjects through various levels of abstraction, with and without figuration. In a style that pays homage to Chuck Close, Frances Morris uses collaged paper in Butterflies (Veronica, Psychiatrist) to express the ambiguity of identity. Nora Thompson’s Scream Without Raising Your Voice compresses loss and attendant grief into a pale, scratched surface on which white words float and nearly disappear.

The disorienting, lonely narratives implied by Mary Vollero’s Snow with Peace Sign and Creek after Fire and the beautiful debris within Marty Edmunds’s Red Wreck Diptych and Thomas Norulak’s Forest Fracture; the way of seeing through association in Rebecca Swanson’s Planted Earth I, recalling the paintings of Gustav Klimt; the landscape reduced to parallel bands of natural and artificial in Stephen March’s Tribes VIII; the intricately resolved harmony of Nancy Middlebrook’s Color Chords #2 – all reflect the varied abstract, formal, and imagistic means by which art helps us navigate. Like all the works in Images 2008, they are, beyond ornament, what we “hang on the walls.”

-- Dinah Ryan

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