“Dark and light. The space between. The moment of change. The necessity of one to identify the other. Hope. Fading. Clearcutting. Nature.” This is how curator/artist Lissa Hunter opens her statement about Darkness and the Light at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA. If you haven’t seen it, don’t stop to read this (unless they’re closed) but jump in the car and head to 522 Congress Street, Portland. The show only lives through September 20 (check the times).
To Hunter’s description, I would add “tranquility and sheer joy.” Not from a preconceived or anticipated notion crafted from the contrasting image of light and dark, but from the emotions that flooded me the minute I turned the corner into the space. Light and dark as deep experiences. I cannot help but see that some of how I process light/dark comes from all the years of having a blind partner and having lived with an energetic interiority of those contrasts.
Hunter writes of her childhood, “When the sun fell below the horizon, colors flattened and lost definition. The sky looked lighter than the treetops below, which became a single mass of darkness.” Often — well, not often, but some, for sure — Henry and I spoke of horizons and treetops, the open bowl of sky, none of which he could literally “see.” And so, I am, now that he is gone, spending more time exploring what “seeing” really is. Beyond the eyes. I am such a visual person — color and light, shape, literal intersections and juxtapositions, the geometry of angles and flow-lines.
Many of the pieces in Darkness and the Light are large — there are few spaces in which large works can live well; this is one. All the works play with light, intentionally or not. Some of the images I show here are segments, and so you must know it’s like reading an excerpt of a poem or a story — just a piece, selected by the writer who is writing about the anything, be it a bridge, a person, a sculpture, a book. It’s often where our energy/focus landed. For me, I would say it’s how my energy was drawn into the work — thwump! There are many entrances, and each of us might choose a different one. Even me. But these are what grabbed me, right then, no turning back. It was a hot spot.
As the days passed (the show went up in July), I thought I might miss this exhibition — between a complicated life and being in Portland at the wrong times — but last Saturday I found myself coming back from Wells in the open window (that’s a serendipitous story in itself), and so there I was! A fabulous exhibition that showcases darkness and the light in ways that literally made me dance, even sing, right there in the gallery.
For me, every piece in this exhibition by fourteen artists was having a dynamic conversation with all the others, accepting every nuanced gradation and inclination. If only we could live that way.
