Skies wide shut

Lauri Twitchell, Henry Wolyniec, and Peter Suchecki at Zero Station

By Chris Thompson

“Prints and digital collages by Lauri Twitchell, Henry Wolyniec, and Peter Suchecki” shows at Zero Station Gallery through October 28. Call (207) 767-2788.

“PUZZLES & CURIOUS PROBLEMS,”: digital silkscreen by Lauri Twitchell and Peter Suchecki.

The scene looks like a flash photo taken through night-vision goggles. A surveillance aircraft makes a clean, strobe-like sweep through five sequential frames. Its target is a single man, whose face alone is visible, digitized into black and green dots against a pristine white expanse. The bottom edge of the paper cuts him off below the nose, so we can see only the look in his eyes: a terror so stylized that it almost pokes fun at the police state it depicts.

Peter Suchecki, the artist whose three-quarter visage is stalked through these prints, calls the series “der luftschriffrigger.” An obviously bulky German version of the phrase “eye in the sky,” even the title points at this play between evoking hyper-serious realities and refusing to take them too seriously. It speaks to us in a stark and direct visual language of the Orwellian world we’ve all been programmed to fear and loathe. And yet the over-dramatic eyes of a face straight out of Lawnmower Man parades the way that the pathos of this struggle has infiltrated our cultural mythology: little brother on the ground pitted against a faceless Big Brother above.

In a time that sees the most harmless of holiday greeting cards yanked out of circulation and destroyed because they make a crack at the commander-in-chief, a time of simplistic but visually elegant soundbites, Suchecki’s five-part one-liner reminds us that while truth may be the first casualty of war, a close second is the sense of humor without which politics are always perverse.

Sometime in the 1970s, the German artist Joseph Beuys spent hours tramping through a field of knee-high grass looking for a single tiny rare flower. At one point, exasperated, he turned to the botanist who was leading him on the quest and exclaimed (in German): “Botanical madness!!”

In their series of digital silkscreens entitled “Puzzles & Curious Problems,” Lauri Twitchell and Suchecki present this botany’s geometrical counterpart. Here, the two-dimensional world again becomes home to a multi-layered comedy, couched in the cultivated visual language of mathematical diagrams.

The Problem is indeed Curious, almost literally, as if a problem from a high-school physics book turned the tables on us and used its own lines and shapes, numbers and letters to start asking us a few things. In “Puzzles & Curious Problems #9” the icons of textbooks (inclined planes, rolling spheres, compass lines, parallelograms) turn the space of the diagram into a kindergarten playground. The shapes refuse to observe our desire that they play nice, and converge on each other like kids in a sandbox wrestling match.

In one of the artists’ proofs, in live and vivid color, the depiction of a fulcrum masquerades as a giant see-saw, and dozens of abbreviations (“Fig. 28”, “Fig. 85”, “Fig. 33”, etc.) jumble into huge piles. It leads us to wonder if, in the process of experimenting with these signs and symbols, Twitchell and Suchecki might have laughed about the closeness between these visual piles of “Fig.”s and real piles of kids: “Fig.”pile and pigpile. The work resonates with the delight they must have taken in its construction. Like the prophetic grounds left over from a cup of Turkish coffee, they invite us to read into them any way we like, so long as we remain open to the lighter moments that arise in the process.

A series of prints by Twitchell frames this inevitable but curious human pursuit of imagining meaning into the world around us. What at first seem to be a number of senseless words and phrases circling high overhead along the gallery wall (“teacher teacher teacher teacher”; “please please pleased to meetcha”; “trees trees murmuring trees” — each silkscreened in bold color onto its own otherwise blank page) are revealed by an unassuming page of fieldnotes at the rear of the gallery to be Twitchell’s translations into English of the distinct calls of a number of species of birds. The page of notes itself becomes a map combining visual and sonic landscapes into one: each birdcall is transcribed on the sector of the flat piece of paper corresponding to where in the actual landscape the sound was made.

While it takes entirely different formal expression, Henry Wolyniec’s collage pieces embody the same kind of attentive engagement with layers of experience and their experimental translation.

Zero Station proprietor Keith Fitzgerald uses the term “high-tech low-tech” to describe Wolyniec’s working method. Using a scanner, an average computer printer, and the fruits of searches through the whole spectrum of media images, he builds abstract tactile scenes with a richness of color, shape, and texture whose layered construction has as much in common with Old Master painting as their is “vice-versa.” With that graceful nonchalant tilt of the neck that dancers alone can achieve, with a cigarette balanced between fingers that are poised for a plié, with her mouth hinting at the possibility of curling into a playful smile, with her head wreathed in flowers and her eyes looking through him as only a lover can, it seems that either she made the pass or she let him think that he did.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.