L. Kent Wolgamott: Sheldon exhibit pairs art with poetry

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“Poets on Painters” is one of those exhibitions that requires some work on the part of its viewers to make its point.

The “work” is reading poems that correspond to the paintings in the show, an effort that takes some time and thought. But if you make that investment, “Poets on Painters” is sometimes enlightening and surprisingly rewarding 

On view at the Sheldon Art Museum through June 29, “Poets on Painters” was organized by Wichita’s Ulrich Museum of Art and curated by Katie Geha, former curator of modern and contemporary art at the Ulrich, and Seattle-based freelance writer Travis Nichols. It pairs 20 contemporary painters with 20 contemporary poets, asking the latter to write a response to a piece by the former.

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Angelina Gualdoni, “Reflecting Skin 2,” 2004, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 X 70 inches, collection of Breckenridge Kling, Rochester, N.Y., is paired with a poem by Kary Wayson. (Courtesy of Sheldon Museum of Art)

Angelina Gualdoni, “Reflecting Skin 2,” 2004, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 X 70 inches, collection of Breckenridge Kling, Rochester, N.Y., is paired with a poem by Kary Wayson. (Courtesy of Sheldon Museum of Art)

Kary Wayson’s poem “Intimacy vs. Autonomy” accompanies the Gualdoni painting:

It is:



Intimacy vs. Autonomy



Light began time.

We filled our daybuckets with it.

We battled our umbrellas.



We dropped our dresses in gutters of gathers.

We managed our fans of poker feathers.

We gave each gust a good hard twist:



Invisible sacks of bread on by.

Well.

And still. We live like



We’re hills.

Imagine my mother imagine her father:

I am in charge of the sky.

Some of the poem/painting combinations share titles, such as “Color System,” a painting of an interlocked system of multicolored lines, circles and a jagged grid by Joanne Greenbaum and Noah Eli Gordon’s dense written description of the work.

Other pairings are more divergent with only the slightest reference to the visual in the poem.

But even when the connection comes closest to falling apart, there’s still something that pulls the poem and painting together.

For example, Dana Schutz’s “Missing Link Finds Superman” is a depiction of a boy in a Superman costume holding a cape, Dorothea Lasky’s “Go on There Boy” starts with a reference to an adolescent before heading off in a different direction than the painting.

In every pairing, then, the exhibition accomplishes the goal described by Anslem Berrigan in the catalog’s introduction — merging the viewing of a painting and reading or hearing a poem into a third kind of experience: “One that hinges on the dynamics a poem (needing to be listened to) and a painting (needing to be looked at) create upon being placed into a close relationship with one another. And, as with any close relationship, such dynamics are necessarily intense, bewildering, tonally charged at all points and capable of changing at any moment.”

 But that kind of experience, which is textually based as much as it is visual, requires engagement on the part of the viewer.

 You can’t “get” “Poets on Painters” by breezing through the galleries and spending a couple of seconds looking at each of the paintings.

During my stops by the exhibition, that’s exactly what happened. Those who came in the galleries zipped by in typical museum-going style, commenting on the color in a painting or stopping to look for a minute or so at a piece that really captured attention.

But no one I saw read the poems, meaning that they missed the main point of the exhibition.

Requiring that kind of effort in our short-attention-span, multi-tasking era is probably too much to ask of viewers. But I’m surprised that at least some of the pairings didn’t arouse some curiosity.

I, for example, was pulled in by Anna Schachte’s “Tunnel of Love,” in which silhouetted boats pass through large rectangular gates adorned with multicolored lights. It is perfectly complemented by Corina Copp’s “Pale Tomato (Illume),” which makes references to boats, sea and flashing lights that both expand on and diverge from the feeling created by the painting.

I was also particularly interested in the poetic response to Monique Prieto’s “Tide,” a text-based painting that reads, in large block letters “the tide being against us when we were almost through.”

Jeff Clark’s “Against” is a description of what he went through in trying to write a poem about the painting that he had only seen in various forms of reproduction, a process that, the more he learned about the painting, the more the poem fell apart. While not intended to do so, “Against” presents an artistic argument attacking the validity of judging any artwork by a reproduction rather than the actual object itself.

There are three painting/poem pairings — one in each of the rooms devoted to the exhibition — that eliminate the need to read the poem. In those cases, the poet can be heard reading his or her work aloud via  a playback device that hangs near the painting.

Listening to the poems takes a little time. But it allows the eyes to focus on the painting while the ears digest the words.

So Paul Killebrew’s “A Certain Purpose of Mind”provides a poetic view of life in an office that tempers the post-9/11 security paranoia that infuses Jules de Balincourt’s “The Watchtower,” which has near faceless workers looking out from a circular tower with nearly all the figures along the edge of the painting.

Amy Sillman’s “Untitled” is an “automatic” style abstraction that hints of a figure, a composition that’s brought to a different kind of light by Monica Fambrough’s “Don’t you think salt is pretty?” a poem that opens with:

“I put my mouth

on the canvas

What is bare

is nurturing.”

Finally John Olson’s “Patch Work” focuses on Christopher Patch’s “Reading Room,” a small, tightly rendered painting of a room with huge windows overlooking a mountain range.

Olson directs the attention to various elements in the composition and the ideas those elements invoke — such as the concept of distance.

“There is more to a line than a line,” Olson writes in the poem — a perfect summary for “Poets on Painters,” an exhibition that illuminates that point, if it’s given enough time.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.