Ken Schiano Show at MassoniArts February 2

An Accumulation of Difficult Things

A solo exhibit of the work of Ken Schiano will be on view at the Carla Massoni Gallery, 203 High Street Chestertown, MD from February 2^nd through March 10th

Introduction

I have always been curious as to how a poet might perceive and translate my paintings, one who treats spoken language in ways similar to my relationship with the visual language, and when it was first suggested that we find someone to review the work of this exhibit, I knew immediately who that should be.  I met Heather McHugh many years ago in Eastport Maine and grew to appreciate her poetry, her fierce voice and her compassion. What follows are her impressions of a few pieces in the exhibit. I hope you find them entertaining and informing.

 ON SCHIANO’S WORK:  A POET’S VIEW

« The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge … never quite fits the sight. » (John Berger, Ways of Seeing)

I look to poems to explore what explanations can’t. And I’m addicted to the arts because they so defy explainers. Yet here I am, about to pour voluminosities into my sorry cup of words. (The eye sees not itself but by reflection, says a scurrilous though ‘noble’ character in Shakespeare.)

Start with Ken Schiano’s Cryptids. To my eye they are also scripteds—ids in script, a wordslinger might say. In this one you can see a horizontal line restrict (or try to put a lid on) airy impulses that appear like thought balloons. But when an impulse can transcend the line, it turns to body parts, or flowers, sexily. (That’s poetry!)

Or cast an eye on how the all-but-human figure in The History of Art in Dyssynchronous Order: fig. x is separated from the flying volumes overhead. That character’s consigned to what can seem a lower region of the frame, where he is pressed (increasingly suppressed) by bars of magnitude and measure, growing up his side as if to build a ceiling over him.

But there above, those book-like (winged?) things can beckon to the dream-reader in him (or us). If you consider him a human figure, you can think him caught between horizons of a data graph, and literary flights above.

(Or so I have to sympathize, when writing prose.)

And then I turn toward The History of Art in Dyssynchronous Order: fig. x and can’t help smiling, as I might if I were in the presence of a cartoon family, half-swallowed up by what my father called the funnies in a newspaper.

Of course I know I’m nuts to dream it thus; sophisticates of art appreciation properly forbid such simple flashes of association (very like a cloud, the fool agrees!).

But all of us are locked in by our own looks, and sometimes confer those looks on others.

 

Finally my favorite in the show has got to be the colorful explosion of NP XI, partly because of powers in the energy and color—but most of all because of a particular detail.

There’s something here I have to read two ways at once: that triangle just left of center.

In one glance it appears an aperture, a cut-out portion, showing what is underneath the white.

But in another eyeblink, it’s a PLAY button, the user’s key.

The triangle’s the part I can’t stop reading as the invitation to the pauses in the music, or the audience’s power to control the time and space of the reception. Play must stand between fast-forward and reverse.

On top of all the otherwise imputed content, it’s the mark of means as meaning, key to uncontainability in line and surface, whether at the hands of artists or of audience. Even an artist cannot claim to have the final word on what the« signs » of art portend, whether they are inscribed in sight, or sound, or other senses.

For art is not reducible to just a past or future fact, a message that an artist meant to telegraph. In some translations from the Greek, Cassandra (seeing what the others can’t) begins to wail AI AI AI AI, a cry beyond the lexical— the voice of feeling, not of a strategic proposition.

In the presence of such feeling, art itself begins to say (from feeling’s own interior) what passes representing.

 Heather McHugh has won numerous awards for her poetry collections including a Guggenheim fellowship and a Witter Bynner fellowship. In 2009 she was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Her poetry collections include To the Quick, Upgraded to Serious, Eyeshot (shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize), Hinge and Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (finalist for the National Book Award), as well as numerous essay collections and translations. She had taught for many years at the University of Washington-Seattle and as visiting faculty member in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College.