Yvonne Jehenson Dunn on Life is Long Life is Short

“Life is Long; Life is Short” is the descriptive title of this moving exhibit at Time & Space Limited in Hudson ---and it is certainly an apt descriptor. The strength of this work, comprised of 32 paintings, lies in its ability to embrace contradictory issues/ideas/realities, simultaneously and joyfully. The result is that it allows the observer to subject-to-doubt accepted historical truisms, mere linear thinking, and, above all, to focus on doubt while also presenting the possibility of hope.

Subjected to doubt here are accepted historical truisms--for example in the depiction of the historical erasure of women, in an image which features Xray proof of DNA by Rosalind Franklin of Cambridge University, and the readymade "fountain" by Baronness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (allegedly appropriated by Duchamp)."Men's Work" and "Women's Work" gives the lie to these women's erasure. By recognizing them, powerfully, and defiantly, this exhibit grants them the space they deserve, thereby refusing to accept their selective historical disappearance. 

What the exhibit does to accepted truisms, the beautiful Bardo sequences do to mere linear thinking. They image, pictorially, the “Ah” of the “Now” while hovering over other-world possibilities in the “in-between-ness” of the Bardo images. The “conversation” this allows has a dual resonance:  it makes palpable, and embraces, two different realities simultaneously: the physical and  the primarily-spiritual that the Bardo suggests.  At the same time, it provides a space wherein a “conversation” can take place between observer and work observed. 

It is in this context that the 17th century writer, François de la Rochefoucauld, comes to mind in a remark he made that is applicable to this deeply-meaningful exhibit: “ Everybody looks at what I look at,” he said,  “but few see what I see.” Showing seeing  is crucial to an exhibit that encapsulates, pictorially, a meditative pause in our everyday thinking  in order to invite us to see anew, to encourage what Dante Alighieri called a "novella vista".  It subjects to doubt accepted wisdom while simultaneously engaging the observer in ways of seeing that engender a deep sense of hope.

Yvonne Jehenson Dunn, Retired Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture,  Hudson NY

Women’s Work

Men’s Work

In Between/Bardo

Dave King on Sandy Moore's Life is Long Life is Short, Time & Space Ltd, Hudson, NY 6/22 -8/22

Life! Isn’t it all just so short—and what the heck’s up with that? Or is it that life is in fact very

long? Unending sequence of moments, boundless and ever fresh, each turn an utter surprise,

each one a shock. All the unique opportunities, all the unique risks. Life, ever new, ever shifting

and reinvented: there lie the joy and the mystery and the grief.

Or: life as a series of cycles, of cycles within cycles, of recurrent emotions, familiar images and

second and third chances, déjà vu upon déjà vu upon déjà vu upon déjà vu… Life as a learning

curve, life familiar and recognizable, life as a structure that builds sequentially, like animated

film. Talk about joy and mystery and grief!

Or, of course, all of the above.

In the painting “SEE? 1.3” from Sandy Moore’s beautiful sequence Life is Long Life is Short, the first thing

I notice is the arm of a child, pudgy and cute. The child supports itself on a bed of spiky grass;

it must be learning to crawl, for there are its haunches and another arm, reaching forward

toward a multicolored sphere or toy. Above the child’s shoulders sit two connected circles which I

recognize from my ophthalmologists’ office: the globes of the eyes, complete with lenses and cornea

and joined at the back anatomically, the whole ocular structure. These are images conceived by an MD, after all.

SEE? See more. See the clouds floating blithely across the big blue luscious world, see the

echoing of eye shapes and cloud shapes and butt shapes. Notice a third arm in the painting,

then a fourth, this one stretching back to catch something round. See how the whole

composition remains in motion, how it turns, a realm of roiling discovery. See?

Now see two other paintings, “SEE? 2.3” and “SEE? 3.3.” See that here too are the clouds and

the eyes and the grass and the toddler, once again crawling, exploring. But here the grass has

grown long, while there it turns gray, as if dusted with frost. In one frame the clouds sparkle

over seas flecked with glorious whitecaps; in the next they fall greenly above a world jauntily

akimbo. Still the trustful arms reach out, still the eyes look and discover.

This is the world of Moore’s elegant and provocative sequence, a work which continually

regenerates, image by image. Thirty-four paintings, each standing alone, lovely thin veils of

color and illumination. Yet each painting nevertheless tilts toward the others, sharing and

conversing. Images variously dreamily untethered or hilariously referential, as in the sudden

appearance of Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat (Moore’s also an animator, after all). Sometimes

there are numbers or quotes from the great modernists; sometimes the political and the

personal rise like the tides. The whole gently urging us to simply see, to simply think.

In the most series’ abstract works, for example, the four paintings in the Bardo series, a single

large sphere or circle recurs. Perhaps this is planetary, perhaps it’s molecular; at times it seems

to be in motion. At one point the circle resolves into a kind of cartoon eye before presumably

evolving further, in images not captured here, for by now we’re thinking about breadth and

circularity. We’ve noticed that structurally, Life is Long Life is Short offers us three repeating

cycles—three Lives, it turns out—composed of nine key stages each.

But three cycles can’t be the end of it, can they? The bardo is ongoing, the piece seems to say,

and in each successive image we see those circles bubble up, inflecting the more narrative

scenes of bodies and cats, skeletons and organs and clouds and, of course, eyes. Further

scenes, further shapes, further colors and ideas stretch out beyond these, forward and

backward, pictorial and abstract, a few even constructivist. Ever shifting, ever in flux.

Reincarnation offers comfort, as Moore has pointed out. But there are hitches, she says too,

and in the crossing of those notions we find the heart of this stimulating and complex work. For

me, that’s where the pleasure smolders most fully. It’s not so much in being persuaded beyond

doubt, for Moore is too thoughtful and generous for that, but rather in being invited to weigh

the shape, the feel and nature of life. To be prompted to see and think and imagine as

ambitiously, as elegiacally—and yeah, as hopefully—as Moore does herself.

Dave King

Fragmented Transparency by Jane Ehrlich at the LUMBERYARD in Catskill NY, 7/ 2022

The 13 paintings that fill the front gallery have evolved from Ehrlich’s "disappearing paintings" of 2019, those comprised of loose whiteish gauzy translucent swaths against a monochromatic background. In these current works, however, the light swaths are more sharply delineated, as if lensed and now reappearing. These bands of white vinyl-based paint are set on a background field of a single acrylic color with fluctuating gradations, typically a light color more serious than pastel. Ehrlich does not succumb to the temptation to add additional notes of a different color. She builds these paintings by layering, which she describes as "a slow process...with nuances of accidents of application... [and] imperfections of surface as [she builds} the overlapping networks of light with paint. Each stroke rests on the one beneath as this process begins to resonate with light."

What are we looking at? Perhaps these swaths are letters, pre-words? Our first seeing--when we started crawling--likely was wordless, nameless. When we first learn to name what is in the seen world, we mimic the names of things, then we recall them, and then we speak them--but that knowing is a slow process forward with many steps backward, before letters have yet occurred to our minds. As adults, we are pretty amnestic to that time situated between seeing and naming. We may not remember, but we can recognize that zone in infancy between seeing and naming--and that zone also may come up in half-dream states. In these paintings do we see letters-- A V, C, L? Hebrew letters? Pictographs, glyphs of light, but definitely not words, and not things.

Or here, maybe an animal, an animal's ear? It is normal to see patterns in random data--a face in a cloud or a pile of clothes. That's termed pareidolia, the seeing of things in complex patterns. Our brains normally do that--we can't help ourselves! Some of these paintings are lithely simple, and some are complex though not complicated. However no pareidolia was deliberately depicted here. Ehrlich’s consistent abstraction fights off imagery ("this looks like a dog"), psychology (this is from my childhood), autobiography (this event happened to me). She is not pushing any particular emotional envelope in these works, except perhaps retinal bliss, a bliss that we recognize, akin to mathematics and music.

Notes by Sandy Moore