As I juried the art work of sixty-three Dodge Fellows, a fascinating theme of inside and out emerged. I selected thirty-six paintings, sculptures, photographs, ceramic pieces and quilts which reveal how artists expressed this duality, perhaps intentionally, perhaps inadvertently, through function, composition, subject matter, materials, psychological or emotional atmosphere, ironic juxtaposition of figures, objects, and metaphors.
Vessels such as Olivia Gabriel’s bowl, Bronze, Barry Zawacki’s covered, yet cracked and textured container, Untitled or David Gary Wright’s quirky Teapot, where the colorful abstract surface might be more delicious than the beverage being served, remind the viewer about the visual and conceptual play of inside and out.
Luminous windows function compositionally and metaphorically as thresholds between the interior and exterior in the black and white photograph, A Small Part, by Emily Feinsod, and in the paintings, New Hampshire Winter Twigs by Annora Happe-Conway and House in Room by Linda Pochesci. The reverse, being outside and wanting to look in, creates tension in the drawing, Adrift in Suburbia: Route 4 Series by So Yoon Lym, and the painting, Vestige, no.1, by Kathleen McGuckin. The landscapes in the Lym and McGuckin works project a slightly menacing quality also present in Doug DePice’s vigorous black and white work, Meadowlands Railroad Yard: Abandoned Railroad Cars, where the outside landscape looks wasted and the inside of the defunct boxcars might be even more grim.
The image of a Mermaid in the Mountains, in a painting with quilting by Toni Thomas, is humorous and ironic, while it is the trees that seem dislocated in Judi Lewis’s monoprint Cypress in Blue #2 and in Amy Evans’s digitally manipulated image, Clouds on the Ground #140C, as they float inside an unreal or foggy environment. In the lower part of Four-Cornered Memory, Robert John O’Boyle draws the erupting Mount Fuji and the curl of the crashing “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” which represent larger natural manifestations of inside and out and are visual allusions to the woodblock prints of the 19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. In her painting, Barter’s Island, Alice McEnerney Cook stacks three bands of water to create recession into space and contrast the safety of a small pool with a larger body of water, metaphorically, the “outside” world. This larger world, represented by images of highways and byways, is incongruously quilted and thus somehow controlled in New Jersey Maps, by Helen Phillips Cole. But one is psychologically discomfited by the largest landscape, at issue in Anne Dushanko Dobek’s installation, Parallel Migrations #12. Here, the political arena of migrations and immigrations, where the same areas are thronged by monarch butterflies and traversed by migrant workers, paradoxically signal what and who is in and/or out.
Using insects and animals to comment on human external actions and inner qualities is age old and continues in Fausto Sevila’s collage, Two Politicians and a Vibrating Beetle. Other artists reveal additional anthropomorphic approaches. If Obar, Cathleen Thole-Daniels’s plunging frog, represents the child-like exuberance of a creature comfortable both inside
and outside the water, could Neal Korn’s dual image of his dog, Double Toby, complete with empty speech balloons, symbolize a snoozing adult, napping on the porch which itself is a physical and psychological transition space between the domestic interior and nature? In Carolyn McGrath’s photograph, Pig/Eye, a verbal and metaphoric conflation of animal and self, an “intelligent” creature is trapped inside a pen and peers skeptically out at the viewer, as if poised to question its predicament.
Captured, entwined, and encircled: each word implies, physically or psychologically, a notion of inside and out, entrapment and freedom. Michael Wolf’s “heroine” surely wants to escape the teetering structure in his sculpture, Perilous. Wrapped in a spider web of feminine lace and labels, Nette Forne Thomas’s woman in Bound by the Word is trying to extract herself from expectations of being a woman, wife and mother. While considered beautiful adornments in an African culture, the neck rings around the throat of Joan-Marie Permison’s sculpted, Giraffe Lady, may imply a woman who is being choked on many levels.
The city, as a locus of human beings and interior and exterior spaces, infuses other objects in the exhibition. A skyscraper rises out the face of a Native American and the earth, crawling with insects, a humorous ceramic portrait of Manhattan by Elsa Carbone, entitled Evolution of the City. People inside their own cell phone worlds and inside the bus scarcely notice that a bald man has been shorn outside on a Chinese sidewalk, in Laura Cuevas’s photograph, Street Barber, Haircut. And it is not clear whether or not a robed monk, also on a cell phone, will be entering the tunnel in Peter Tilgner’s digitally manipulated image, Underpass.
In Jay Seldin’s digital giclée print, Circus Clown, Barcelona, Spain, a real clown walks outside past a poster image of his quasidoppelganger. Art and life also overlap in Window, London #2 by Orville Rose, whose digital photograph layers images and reflections of a sculpted nude body form, a window, and a photographer possibly standing outside on the street. And how much more exposed could the human body be than in John Carey’s flayed and dressed male figures in Gross Anatomy, an acrylic and mixed media piece? But perhaps the ultimate human confrontation of inside and out, of interior and exterior, occurs in Leonard Merlo’s profound, meditative painting, Living Close to Death # 4.
Mona Brody’s haunting image of an extinguished chandelier in The Dancing Stopped and organically abstract works such as Jean Burdick’s Banff Reflections and Arlene Gale Milgram’s Stone Triptych # 1, explore variations of inside and out using line, color, light and shading. In contrast, Don Standing, in his painting Untitled, and Vincent Buchinsky in his construction, Confrontation, fashion geometric abstractions with syncopated rectangles and textured surfaces to create slight hints of visual and surface movement. Ultimately, the notion of inside and out is fused in Harold Olejarz’s digital inkjet print, All Connected, where one sees through the almost claustrophobic labyrinth of human life, symbolized by the intricacy of the wires and switches, to the deceptively calm blue sky and the outer complexity of the universe.
Virginia Fabbri Butera, Ph.D.
Director of the Therese A. Maloney Art Gallery
Chairperson of the Art Department Associate Professor of Art History
Please contact Elaine Rastocky at 973-540-8443 x118 for more information.
