Greer Pagano’s Essay

As I sit down to write this essay, the circadian brood x is emerging after seventeen years of underground growth. In dramatic fashion, masses of cicadas are crawling out of the earth in order to mate, reproduce, and then quickly complete their life cycle. It feels almost too easy to connect this periodic pattern of insect emergence with our collective human egress after over a year of covid-related quarantine. And yet the comparison presents itself. In the United States anyway we are benefitting from ample access to vaccines, which allows us more freedom to interact with others

​​As I sit down to write this essay, the circadian brood x is emerging after seventeen years of underground growth. In dramatic fashion, masses of cicadas are crawling out of the earth in order to mate, reproduce, and then quickly complete their life cycle. It feels almost too easy to connect this periodic pattern of insect emergence with our collective human egress after over a year of covid-related quarantine. And yet the comparison presents itself. In the United States anyway we are benefitting from ample access to vaccines, which allows us more freedom to interact with others.

Shall I go further and compare our newly released selves with the soft bodied blanched versions of cicada adults loudly screaming their presence? Are we new again to our worlds? Unlike the first responders, service providers, and medical heros who never stopped being in the world fighting covid, there are those of us who feel strangely fresh, unused to being in the same spaces with others without layers of protection and the accompanying anxiety and fear. 

It is not all basking in the sun and finding a mate who will help us enact the destiny we are born to fulfill, and so perhaps at this point I should put aside the comparison. Seventeen years might have passed for the cicadas. Deforestation and climate change might have altered the species’ ecosystems, but biologically, they persist in their patterns. We humans emerge to a stark world where racism, gun violence and despotism are raging catastrophically even as we delight in the return to hugging family, sitting in movie theaters, and being present for those who need us.

The novelty of the present moment seems to require careful consideration. Headlines are full of advice about how to make up for a lost academic year, how to travel safely, date, dress, and even how to have conversations. Magazine covers and comics make clever fun of our present state and attempts at starting anew. And this is all happening because of a general consensus that we need advice. Collectively our emergence requires analysis. Do we go back to how things were before? Or can we make productive and positive changes that will benefit our physical and mental health? Can we prioritize loved ones? Can we keep working from home? Can we travel less and lower our carbon footprint? Can we correct the inequities that remote school learning made exceptionally and devastatingly clear.

The novelty of the present moment seems to require careful consideration. Headlines are full of advice about how to make up for a lost academic year, how to travel safely, date, dress, and even how to have conversations. Magazine covers and comics make clever fun of our present state and attempts at starting anew. And this is all happening because of a general consensus that we need advice. Collectively our emergence requires analysis. Do we go back to how things were before? Or can we make productive and positive changes that will benefit our physical and mental health? Can we prioritize loved ones? Can we keep working from home? Can we travel less and lower our carbon footprint? Can we correct the inequities that remote school learning made exceptionally and devastatingly clear.

This is all part of the thought pattern that led to this exhibition as a consideration of what we do now. How do we newly interact? How do we reassert our social selves? What do we do with our bodies now that we are reapproaching proximity and intimacy? As we consider being close to others again questions arise: where do I stand, where is it safe? Where is it appropriate?

Take Bianca Beck’s large scale sculptural forms as they lunge through space. They feel both bold and intrusive. Confident and commanding. Their raucously colored surfaces beg investigation. Looking at the whole requires circumnavigation, movement in proximity to a thing in order to quench curiosity about it. And we have to be careful. We become mindful of our bodies as we negotiate the space. Looming and enticing. It is purposefully an installation that could be described as a grouping, a forest, a crowd, a cluster, a herd, a troupe, or a multitude. Because what could be more delightful at this moment than seeing lots of art in person? With our own eyes and with only air filling the space between. No screens, no zooms, no squares. Instead we have the delicious and available luxury of texture, light, and color all at once. We can be amidst and among people and art. We can and should courageously lunge towards the world. And yet, we must be careful and acknowledge the power and precariousness of our actions.

What lingers too is in the work of Tamara Gonzales’ paintings from 2018. This group forms an expression of duality, of inside and outside, of power and protection. In some of the works, lace fabric is used as a stencil and the pattern revealed suggests a screen, upon which various female figures stand. It is a liminal zone, through which we can see but past which we don’t yet dare. Within the shallow spatial limits created by floral or skull motifs there is pressure and intensity.

The power of the standing figures throughout this series of paintings is marked by decorative edges or snake-like loops activated with colorful and repetitive ornamentation. Inspiration for these patterns comes from Gonzales’ experiences travelling in Peru and is connected to her friendship with indigenous Shipibo peoples and her knowledge of their textile work, often exuberantly and cosmically geometric. Here the painted barriers formed out of these patterns are energetic boundaries, tingling at the edges. Aren’t we all tingling at the edges? Our bodies pushing outward into the world, feeling and anticipating the chaotic return to whatever is past that threshold.

But how much do we dare? Is there a limit to our desire for proximity? Where will our enthusiasm take us? Could there be a hazardous result to this renewed togetherness? These questions bring us to the celebratory and dramatic excess on display in the work of Christina Forrer, whose tapestries and watercolors are replete with bodies in excessively close contact. Her works explore our connectivity as bodies flow into each other, as tongues and extremities reach out and caress or take hold or infiltrate or grab onto each other. These actions seem simultaneously hesitant and aggressive. A display of the exquisite duality - embrace, disgust, affinity, rejection. The raucous colors and tumultuous compositions tempt flights of fanciful interpretations - as we might be watching the process of metamorphoses where chaotic creation, transformation, and destruction whirl together with cartoonish humor and wit.

But how much do we dare? Is there a limit to our desire for proximity? Where will our enthusiasm take us? Could there be a hazardous result to this renewed togetherness? These questions bring us to the celebratory and dramatic excess on display in the work of Christina Forrer, whose tapestries and watercolors are replete with bodies in excessively close contact. Her works explore our connectivity as bodies flow into each other, as tongues and extremities reach out and caress or take hold or infiltrate or grab onto each other. These actions seem simultaneously hesitant and aggressive. A display of the exquisite duality - embrace, disgust, affinity, rejection. The raucous colors and tumultuous compositions tempt flights of fanciful interpretations - as we might be watching the process of metamorphoses where chaotic creation, transformation, and destruction whirl together with cartoonish humor and wit.

And so as we reset ourselves after Covid-19’s first dramatic and fatal strike, let us survey the damage and the remains and take to the world again with desire and fear, both too close and too far from each other and figure out again how we stand with each other, and like Ovid begins his Metamorphoses: Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing.