Exhibition Review: Salt Lake City
If You See Something, Say Something
Dollar Daze at Mestizo Arts
by Geoff Wichert

From an 8-foot section of wall, a constellation of some 70 human eyes returns the viewer’s gaze. Each watercolor image measures 3 by 5 inches, and while all share the fundamental anatomy of a human face, no two have so much as a color scheme in common. In fact, none is colored realistically, and neither human variation nor the question of the gaze provides an exhaustive reading of the work’s meaning. The title, "Debe Un Ojo De La Cara"—the Spanish equivalent of "It will cost you an arm and a leg"—hints at something deeper. In fact, the work falls into a large body of recent artworks that may be a response to the waning of sensationalism and the increasingly futile effort to shock. These have in common a quality of under-statement, of stubbornly enduring in the mind while multiple meanings, none dominant and none mutually exclusive, slowly accumulate around them in the viewer’s mind. One person has two eyes; the world has fourteen billion. Two nimble eyes can penetrate the material world, while too many tend to crush individual insight beneath the irresistible weight of their expression. Conversely, the “I” of the ego can see what it wants to see, while sooner or later the witness of the people bends from private delusion towards verifiable fact.

The woman who made the eyes begins each day by painting one, a variation on the Zen practice of clearing the mind and centering the self by meticulous, ritual preparation leading to a spontaneous, creative gesture. Ink painting. Poetry writing. She traces the importance of the eye to the months following 9/11, to her observation that so many of the eyes she saw around her in her Lower-Manhattan neighborhood showed the effects of daily exposure to smoke and dust, which were also the effects of grief and growing despair. Her husband, meanwhile, noticed how hard times eroded the pride that led hard-scrabble entrepreneurs to display the first dollar they ever made prominently alongside their business license. Where she explored those eyes, he experimented with the possibilities for self-expression provided by the one-dollar bill.