Expanded opening

Heightened perception at Colleen Kinsella's "Work Knot"

by Jenna Russell

"Work Knot" shows at the Calderwood Building, at 61 Pleasant Street, through Friday, October 6. Call 773-3411 for appointments, or attend during upcoming openings from 6 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, September 16 (featuring Tarpigh), and September 23 (featuring Cerberus Shoal).

ORGANIC: the steel skeleton of Kinsella's photograph "Galaxy" references the biological grounding of her paintings.

In some ways, the first night of "Work Knot" at the Calderwood Building in Portland was just like the opening of any other art show. People chatted

in small groups, eating hors d'oeuvres, occasionally drifting to look at the paintings and prints on the walls. There were moments when no one seemed to notice the performance by Two Holes, when you could briefly imagine the oddness was all in your head: the green-haired guy down on all fours picking up plastic spiders, the woman in fluffy red bedroom slippers pacing the radiator, the shrieking bells and blasting records upstairs [see accompanying article on facing page].

Most of the time, though, people admired the spectacle. Rather than distracting from Colleen Kinsella's art, the space's transformation seemed to create an atmosphere of attentive expectation, a questioning receptiveness that drew the crowd to search the walls for answers during lulls. As one who has always loved museums and galleries for their calm and quiet, I have never craved actors and music in these sacred spaces. But that which brings an audience, and makes them think, is good.

A painter, sculptor, and performer who has lived in Portland for three years, Kinsella seems not to meet many creative techniques she dislikes. Her show in the Calderwood lobby is like a glossary of art processes: lithograph, intaglio, drypoint, silkscreen, photography, painting. Her subject matter is much less varied, and makes the work stand together.

Kinsella is interested in the female body and its reproductive functions, stereotypes of women and societal expectations. Her images include Barbie dolls and paper dolls, a thorned tiara (Jesus as Miss America), and, at the heart of the matter, the uterus itself.

It's territory that has been well-covered by women artists, but Kinsella makes it her own with a fascinating fixation on skeletal structure. In many of her figures, bones are inexplicably visible through the skin, sketched under the surface or painted on top. Other innards are visible also. A series of lithographs, the "Just Like A Woman" portfolio showcases headless bodies, female forms reduced to dressmaker's dummies, with their vital reproductive parts detailed in red at the center. These look delicate and floral, like diagrams from botany textbooks.

Biology is the basis for the series; titled "Waiting," "Ready," "Complications" and "Empty," the prints appear to chart the stages of the ovulation cycle. The topic reappears in "Uterus, Four Stages of Development" and "Torso/Ovary," a watercolor and ink drawing where a flower-shaped machine of reproduction prepares to drop a shining egg from an opening like a faucet.

The bones that show up in Kinsella's "Ladies Series" are sometimes paired with references to size and weight. In one of the pieces (Xerox, paint, chalk, pencil, and gesso, combined with the intimate sensibility of a charcoal drawing), a woman stands by a window hitching up her skirt with her hand. "Can only guess her measurements," reads a faint text fragment on the surface. "Never seen her."

In this context, the bones seem to invoke the common female desire for lost flesh, diet-induced shrinking on a quest to fit the right numbers. We think of the psychology of anorexia, the subconscious longing of some girls to starve themselves back to childhood and escape the complications of womanhood. On the flip side, the bones might represent the woman's inner strength, the stripping away of gender to reveal something essential. Steel skeletons also appear in Kinsella's photograph "Galaxy," of the silent roller coaster at Old Orchard Beach.

Her strongest work -- the "Ladies," the "Just Like A Woman" series -- succeeds by grounding mystery in reality. The bodies are familiar, reeling us in, while sparks fly in the X-ray revelations, of secret bones or magic baby compartments. Did it matter that glitter and dried flowers littered the floor at the Calderwood, part of the installation, or that white balloons floated waist-high, or that Oscar the Grouch, from Sesame Street, sang "I Love Trash" at high volume? Only so much as the night's strangeness helped to heighten perception.

There were no obvious links between the art on paper and the art unfolding around it, but there were plausible connections. The woman in red, with her boa, wig, and slippers, was a living caricature, a vivid illustration of the way the real woman can vanish under layers of pose, paint, and costume. One performer paced in an alcove halfway up the stairs, using a tiny brush to paint his feet, arms, and a cluster of branches. Because of him, the act of art-making felt immediate and real, unlike some gallery shows where product and process are divorced.

Not all the art at "Work Knot" was labeled, or easily identified as such. Terrifying clumps of yellow wax, or something like it, hung in a row from the ceiling, a Halloweenish touch. A superb surreal detail near the snack table, easy to miss, was the piece of wood labeled "reality" and propped up in a folding chair. "Here we have reality ... in a not too comfortable chair," read a note on the seat. "It will be leaving soon/We must make room." Funny, poetic, unexpected, and provocative, it was the perfect footnote for an evening when reality was briefly altered. That's a rare occasion, but it happens again at the Calderwood this Saturday.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.