We expect alchemy from poets and artists. To hear Lance Larsen and Jacqui Biggs Larsen tell it, some of their audience expects more from them. In the text introducing Animal Brilliance, their collaborative exhibit of her paintings captioned by his epigraphs, they report being made to feel they should produce work together. It’s rare enough for two painters or two poets to do this, and there is no reason to expect artists whose media are so utterly different to do better in such an effort. A visit to the Auditorium Gallery on the first floor, where the Larsens have mounted a valiant effort to meet their supporters’ wishes, holds no surprises. Rather, as might be expected, when the painting is working it does so without need of words, while when the words work they create their own pictures in the reader’s mind. It would feel great to say, “But never mind; go see the show, which triumphs over such concerns!” Alas, one must stop at “Go see the show!” Those who do will find two separate metaphorical channels, each proceeding along its own challenging path. Either is good as far as it goes, but neither will help a viewer to better follow the other.
Jacqui Biggs Larsen’s paintings, contrary to what one may have heard, are not mixed-media collages. She does draw her rich, layered imagery from the wealth of illustration that inundates anyone with open eyes, but she carefully unifies them in paint. Instead of a curatorial challenge of contrasting materials to be reconciled, she presents a unified surface viewers can tease apart for its various sources, or accept as a metaphor for how our minds construct fantasies and memories. The works should be seen, even though they must be peered at through the worst gallery lighting in memory. In fact, looking at the light running down one margin of an otherwise dark canvas, or elsewhere at the hot spots falling without reason, or where nothing hangs, one of our party guessed that the show hadn’t been lit at all; that someone had neglected to reset the lights from the previous exhibition, and we were seeing a luminous ghost of the gallery’s recent past.
As I write in our article on poetry (see here), Lance Larsen’s brief, caption-like lines cannot do what he is capable of. “Savanna zebras, zebras in zoos, / some of us so fleshed in our stripes / we have forgotten why we are hiding” is good, but his true strength can be found in anecdotal narratives of 20, 30, or 40 lines, in which he argues with himself before finally accepting the wisdom of his circumstances. Yet these epigrams give good reasons to seek his poetry in that longer form, where he traces the voyage of strangers, one who writes and one who paints, who become a couple, and then a family that includes a painter and a poet.
One may speculate at this point whether Jacqui Biggs Larsen could illustrate the heart of her family the way Lance Larsen has dissected it, or if he could give up his scalpel and assemble the details of awareness the way she does. They are certainly welcome to try again, but they’re also free to continue doing what each does so well alone. Either way, someone will be watching to see, listening to hear.
Animal Brilliance, featuring paintings by Jacqui Biggs Larsen and poetry by Lance Larsen, is at the Harold B. Lee Library’s Auditorium Gallery through January 28.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
