Frisbie Street Art

Artist Debra Jan Bibel of Studio Lone Mountain reviews Illuminating Shadows – Art Show in the Dark:

“In the days before gas and electric street lights, people reluctantly spent time outdoors in darkness. The throw of a rationed candle would cast shadows around the home and a candle lantern or torch would do little to stem the fear of what may be a short distance ahead….or behind. The home fireplace provided both warmth and a cone of light where family would find a sanctuary from darkness.

Darkness held mystery; its moonlit shadows were hallucinatory, where an elevated root becomes a snake and a small sound could become a terror. Sinister characters lurked in darkness. A young child even today takes comfort in a small night light within the room, and adults silently appreciate the lit safety exit signs in the darkness of movie theaters.

With this historic and psychological background, the viewer comes to the Frisbie Street Art Space’s show, Illuminating Shadows. Armed with a small flashlight, this curious person enters the darkened gallery, perceiving dark gray objects on or near walls and some lighted sculptures, one of which being the life-sized female form near the door, suggestive of a cyborg or a three-dimensional mystical anatomical painting of Alex Grey.

The aloneness of a walk in a deserted nighttime street is indicated by nearby photographs of such locales; a sense of quiet and stillness is perceived. At the opposite corner, a shelf of small photographs of people wearing vampire fangs plays on the association of darkness with witchcraft, the monster, and the occult.

The next room contains a trio of photographs of related interest: life, death, and transformation. The beam of the flashlight encounters the Minotaur, here a person with a bovine skull, which lives in the dark labyrinth of mythology; another person is festooned with a hang rope; and a peculiar fellow is seated against a cavernous wall shadowed by distant light. A nearby wall sculture lit from within is in fact a labyrinth spiral.

In addition to darkness, there is the hidden within light: the invisible message that requires an agent to be revealed. In this instance, it is ultra-violet or black light cast upon a sign board that overtly says Truth, but covertly has the commentary.

Similarly, a vertical series of small, densely illustrated images are of fluorescent paint, and they glow when the U-V light reaches them. The effect returns the viewer to the 1960s, when such posters and black lights were the common apartment decor. Hanging just off an opposite wall are large black-and-white transparencies of portraits of women. The flashlight beams project the images onto the wall, the size and sharpess varying with distance. Here, too, light is the revealing agent.

Elsewhere, photographs emphasize the role of shadow in relief, in enhancing shape, in contrasting form with emptiness. Sculptures incorporating light, also bring forth schisms, as varying hues break through slits, and on the center floor stands a marine medusa jelly fish, its tenticles radiating outward to touch the walls. These and an aquarium of bright, boldly colored critters and objects suggest the biological use of and defense against darkness: bioluminescence. [Think about the night scences in the movie Avatar.]

A haunting series of photographs are of female mannequins, situated within shadows of a wire cage. The reference of a Twilight Zone episode involving such mannequins may come to mind, and once again the mystery, the transformation, the magic of darkness is suggested.

The last inner room houses a projector whose cast image (and sound) is a shadowed person against flowing water. Perhaps the viewer may think about the waves or cycles of light and dark and the necessity of opposites or valences for process and change. At least the shadow suggests the hidden form, as the projections in Plato’s cave. The shadow is a mystical metaphor.

The artists and curators of this exhibit are to be commended for an extraordinarily worthy and atypical presentation. The varied art thoroughly covers the topic. The viewer confronts mystery, aloneness, strangeness, and primal fears as well as hope, mystical transformations, and surprises. This conception of interaction and discoveries within darkness is enjoyable. Way cool, folks!

Debra Jan Bibel, Ph.D.
Studio Lone Mountain
www.lonemountain-art.com