“Narratives #5” is a collection that continues my ongoing winter theme of dark days, with this grouping emphasizing sacred spaces! Kim Callas’ “The First Mask #1” starts the set off with a visage of an archetypal being, from her “Bearded Women” series. Her technique, which utilizes very liquid medium on delicate rice paper, has created an aura of radiant wrinkles emanating from the figure’s countenance producing a religious undertone to her “Origin Stories” themed work. Matt Lock return’s to our “Narratives” series with his drawing titled: “My Room-Get Out”, fitting into the theme of “sacred spaces” by depicting the ubiquitous bedroom computer station, where we have lost, by now, generations of our youth to the stultifying seductions of cyber space. Matt’s teenager has mutated into a large lobed alien, or possibly this is just a view into another teenager’s room on another planet, whose beings have achieved the same advances in technology as we have here on planet earth? Either way the sacred ritual is the same: upright, supine-posture, and hands typing out the mystical rubric, sacred offering bowl, ceremonial pajamas and nearby meditation mattress. Fabian Häusermann’s mesmerizing ink jet transformations presents us with a doppelganger representation of a sacred space of information in his “Old Library” ink jet collage. Fabian creates ink drawings that he then copies as a reduction, which he then draws on again and reduces again, creating a mystical hall of mirrors and dizzying landscape of vibrating patterns. Cecilia Whittaker-Doe’s untitled ink landscape evokes a moody overcast day at a special sacred place in nature. The heavenly sky glows and a solitary pyramidal tree sits at the edge of a body of water suggesting the land-marking of a place in order to remember and return, for solace, prayer or meditation. Maryjean Viano Crowe’s “Id, Ego, Superego” is a constructed inner space, arranged altar-like as a stack of irregular rectangles topped with a roof-like triangle. Their arrangement seems to suggest an unfolded envelope or altarpiece that might normally be folded or locked shut, but for the desperation of the figures within; facets of the psyche that are exposed momentarily in some kind of domestic turmoil.

Kenny Cole