Tales waiting to be told
Art Gallery of Burlington exhibition invites our imaginations to soar
Art has almost always been about telling stories: Personal, historical, religious, and mythological.
Words, spoken and written, can begin with a particular moment and move back and forth in time. But a painting or a sculpture freezes one moment and invites our imaginations to fill in the rest.
Storytellers, an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington, brings together five tellers of tales: Mary Philpott, Olexander Wlasenko, Maria Sarkany, Melanie MacDonald and Hope Forstenzer.
They find inspiration in many sources, including ordinary life, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, old black and white movies and scrapbooks.
Philpott, an award-winning ceramist, is well-known for her sculptures and installations of animals and birds. Her latest installation, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” riffs on a traditional nursery rhyme. Her protagonists are 15 crows, or black birds — not four-and-twenty. And there’s no pie in sight.
Six birds gather on the ground. Two wear crowns, a nod to the king and queen of the nursery rhyme. Nine fly above them.
Social skills are on show: One of the birds on the ground, beak open, head raised, caws at a bird in flight with a silvery chain hanging from its beak. Crows have a reputation for collecting shiny things, and sure enough another flying bird holds a coin in its beak. Imagine the kind of sounds they make when you fill in this story.
A darker tale unfolds in Wlasenko’s “Looking Back,” a black and white charcoal drawing. His story sources come from old Ukrainian movies collected by his father. He’s chosen a moment from a film and offered us a new narrative to create.
We find ourselves in the back seat of a car. The back of the front seat serves as a barrier hiding some of what is going on beyond it. A man sits on the left behind the steering wheel but we can’t see his face. We can’t tell whether the car is moving or stopped.
We see only part of a woman’s dolllike face. What is she thinking? Is she remembering — looking back to the past — or is she turning around to look at us? Do we want to be discovered lurking in the back seat?
What about the bridge in front of the car? Are they driving into a river? Come up with your own story.
Sarkany, by contrast, paints the world she knows best; that is, events and settings in Hamilton and Burlington. Well-known for her landscapes, she also paints urban views in which ordinary people engage in familiar activities on sunny days: Attending local festivals, listening to music, walking and jogging.
In “Recharging in Burlington,” Sarkany’s vignette involves a pair of joggers in the foreground of a treelined street that dominates the composition.
So there’s a starting point for yet another story.