LOOKING AT YOU - Jul-Sep Review

review by Kevin Nance

Art — visual art, at least — is about looking. We look at art, of course, but what happens when the art looks back at us? Can there be, between the viewer and the viewed, something like eye contact? In “Looking at You,” a new themed group exhibition organized by Arts Connect at the Central Bank’s John G. Irvin Gallery, the answer, at least sometimes, is yes.

The eyes have it in this show of 39 pieces by artists answering an open call from around the commonwealth. It’s easy to become locked in a series of staring contests with the people in these works, including, notably, a smiling young woman in a gorgeous headscarf (Denise K. Webb’s precise watercolor “Portrait of Laila”); a pair of fearsome indigenous figures in what might be elaborate battle gear (Hector Urdaneta), each of which are pieced together, mosaic-style, from six small acrylic paintings; a fashionable woman in a fancy hat (Valerie Timmons) whose eyes, half-hidden in the shade of the brim, regard us with what might be defensiveness or disdain; and another smiling woman (Duane Keaton’s “Meredith”), whose face emerges, ingeniously, from a collection of Lego blocks that recall the massed strokes and pixels of Chuck Close.

Elsewhere, and even more memorably, the eyes confronting us are those of animals: the implacable

gaze of a leopard (Lesa Aker’s pastel “Focused”), which affords the distinct sensation of
being hunted; the suspicious side-eye of a lizard (Karl Anderson’s acrylic “Pogonia”), perhaps the show’s best demonstration of technical painting
skill; and a delightfully comic portrait of a bird
with the show’s drollest title (Stephanie Gemperline’s “Do You Know How Hard It Is to Make an Emu Not Look Like Ernest Borgnine?”).

In at least one case — Sarah Cobb Spradlin’s terrific “Parallel Harmonies,” in which a couple playing a duet

on a piano seem oblivious of their own reflections in the mirror — the “looking at you” theme is turned on its head, except for a cat and a dog, who seem engaged in something like pet telepathy. (Spradlin’s “Halloween Dance 1913,” in which children peer out from behind fright masks, is also masterly.) And in Jackie Lucas’s excellent digital photography collage “King of the Derby,” the great black jockey Oliver Lewis, dignified in waistcoat and tie, calmly surveys the modern-day Derby, quietly demanding to be seen.