Hopkinton Artists Show May Cause Discomfort

Chris Kyle left some of her work in her studio for the May Cause Discomfort show at the because it is comfortable.

At the show, as you enter, Kyle’s ceramics and painted wood objects – her latest – pull you into them. Photos don’t do them justice because even her works that are primarily on a flat surface hide the next dimension, while assuring you it's there.

You want a peek, just a glimpse, of the un-seeable.  Then there are their shadows, Kyle said. You might not notice them but look again. Kyle made sure to include them in the descriptions.

It is startling to see, for instance, the bag-like object featured in ads for the show, somehow propelling itself off the wall. Part of the Maybe Something, Maybe Not series, it and its pals pop as if hovering off the wall. Do they float solidly in space, or perhaps even move toward you?

Sweetly, Kyle’s eye kept wandering to her smallest, most-most recent wall hanging, Birthday. It shows shards of egg shell giving way to yellow lines of geometry that transfer the protruding sharp-edged ovals onto the vertical plane. Dark, polliwog shapes swirl toward the edge.

Ruth Brownstein, whose work casually greets viewers (and listeners) after passing through what looks to have once been a small pantry at CAA, changes the mood to dark, wild and tragic humor.

“I have no curtains on the windows in my house,” she said when a viewer asked about her personal window treatments.

No wonder. Brownstein's mixed-media depictions separate wallpaper from window in ways too perfect to exist, ways that defy physics but not beauty nor ultimately, horror.

Set against banal wallpaper, floating above colored paper strips that, like in Kyle’s work, add depth and texture, the windows look onto scenes of environmental disaster.

A gang of Hazmat-suited figures crowd zombie-like. Their path sheers off from your vantage point. A lone human stands among toppled barrels and oozing rivers of something pooling at his foot. He should not be there. Hummers shoulder together. They are outsized, lovingly grilled, menacing.

These figures we look out at ignore us, the viewer, as if they are unaware. Then a startling thought is spoken beside me. We are not looking out but peeking in. Scarier.

Brownstein also has a video playing in the background. You can put on headphones and listen. In My Life as Told by Joseph Campbell, she plays all the characters in her family, looking like a Looney Tunes director stage-blocking the action for a new Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck ballet.

But inside the headphones, Brownstein's antically voicedc characters, though hilarious, tell painful tales.

The character Ruth dons a poster with a red slash as she remembers her first menstrual period in Shaker Heights, Ohio. She worries that her father and brother and everyone will find out! Her mother soothes her, “Now you can look in the mirror every day and weigh yourself every day but don’t tell anyone exactly how much you weigh and you go shopping and you're a princess!”

Since crown, poster and advice are not awkward enough, her nose soon grows six inches longer.

Kris Waldman, and again, photos do not do her work justice, takes space and rips it with sculpture. Her eye is so perceptive that it takes several passes to begin to find visual language for this work that seems to address space in familiar ways only to confound familiar expectations.

Waldman’s forms and shapes rouse recognition,  then take that sense of "I've seen this somewhere" and prod it explosively outward or awkwardly back into itself. Some of these shapes toy with color. The colors also are almost-but-not-exactly familiar. Is that maybe flesh-and-mud? That is definitey white on white on white on ... wait a minute.

Waldman said she likes how a series of pieces arranged on one mantel at this show differs from the same set at another show, lined up similarly but separately, each on its own small shelf.

Showcased in May Cause Discomfort's advertisement, Waldman’s Land Urchin is transformed by the pieces around it. Imagine a person greeting you in an unfamiliar language later speaking understandably, but with an accent.

Which is authentic? The vocal flow or the labor of translation? Perhaps you’re just imagining speech when song, gesture or the soundtrack of movement is the communication.

The pieces of Waldman’s work comfort each other on display in their room at the CAA. Their shapes comment on each other, tend toward a language. Alone, they might, OK, cause discomfort.

The best thing about May Cause Discomfort at the Cultural Arts Alliance, 98 Hayden Rowe St. (between Hopkinton High School and the Hopkins School) is that there is no substitute for its immediacy. 

It has to be seen, in person, to be assessed and reckoned fairly. Photos and words are only approximations of this art. The works speak in a way you have to see or hear on their terms. 

Maybe they'll cause discomfort, maybe thought or emotion.

May Cause Discomfort
Ruth Brownstein, Chris Kyle and Kris Waldman
Feb. 6 to March 14
Weekdays 11-4, Saturdays 1-4, Sundays 12-3
Cultural Arts Alliance, 98 Hayden Rowe St., Hopkinton
Encaustic Paintings, Mixed Media, Photography & Sculptures

Works from the show are available for purchase from $350 to $1,100.

Ruth Brownstein's website www.ruthbrownstein.com
Kris Waldman's website www.kriswaldman.com
Chris Kyle's website www.christinekyle.com