Love Letter Invitational
Second Street Gallery
Through August 12
art
Local artists and writers have paired up at the Second Street Gallery to “speak” about love—and the results are as diverse as the emotional responses to love itself. Most of the 41 works included in this show are not love letters in the classic sense. Indeed, they’re many heartbeats away from the traditionally scrawled missives that begin “Dearest…” This is 2006, after all, and the collaborators in this collection address all types of love, not just the kind between swooning suitors. What’s more, they’ve done it in every conceivable fashion—from paintings to pottery, found objects to photographs, line drawings to mixed-media installations (and I do mean installations—as in an entire plastered kiosk, a goddess-summoning temple and desks filled with writing paraphernalia).
That’s not to say that these “letters” are unrecognizable as such. “House Cricket,” (mixed media) by Suzanne and Dan Stryk, contains a sepia-toned, handwritten love letter—a poem that metaphorically compares the romantic love between husband and wife to that of two crickets (“…seeking that trilling in each other’s corners”). The painting “How Beautiful the Beloved,” by Gregory and Trisha Orr, depicts colorful, alphabet-block letters that spell out the words of the poem (“…whether garbed in mortal tatters or in her dress of everlastingness—moon broken on the water”). And “Love Poem,” a poster/CD combo by Browning Porter and Paul Curreri, plays on the words “falling in love” (“Fall in love, we say as if love were beneath us”), and is printed on a potpourri of things for admirers to take away, so that, after all this loving, gallery goers can depart with “letters” in hand.
Each creation addresses the viewer (albeit indirectly) and encourages him (or her) to pick up just about anything and create—which is what the organizers of this show are obviously hoping for. (There’s even an adjoining art room provided for attendees to wax poetic.)
The question is: In a show about love, should everyone be able to feel it? Or is love, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder? Can you really think your way to love? Do you even want to? Is love a province of the mind, or is the mind just an island somewhere that is forgotten when the heart takes over? Sure, all of these questions may leave you a bit overwhelmed, seeking to catch your breath—but that’s the idea. It’s a sure sign that love is in the air.—Karrie Bos
The Oxford American
Spring 2006
words
The banner “Best of the South” on the cover of the Spring 2006 Oxford American betokens a few pages of mindless fun: tiny, pithy write-ups beneath categories such as “Best massage within a 50-mile radius of Little Rock,” and “Best place to feel like you’re trapped in a Flannery O’Connor short story.”
Think again. What the magazine actually offers is 20 fairly lengthy, thoughtful prose “odes” to an unpredictable array of things, abstractions, books, people, etc. To name a few: chicken’s feet (as in for eating), a Memphis night, Gone with the Wind, and Warren Oates. So who the hell is Warren Oates? You’ll have to read it to find out: Several of the pieces don’t reveal their secrets until you plunge into them.
With all due respect to Mr. Oates, the subjects of the odes are thin, and most don’t, as journalists would say, write themselves. Besides pointing out that chicken’s feet don’t really taste like chicken, but aren’t bad, what else is there to say? Isn’t crooning about the virtues of Gone with the Wind kind of old news? Just as so much depended upon William Carlos Williams when it came to pulling off a poem about a wheelbarrow, these pieces prevail or crumble according to the skill and verve of each writer.
Two examples perfectly sum up the disappointing unevenness. Well-known fiction writer Richard Bausch uses a nicely arranged series of concrete details to illuminate the particular charm of “the first warm night of the year” in Memphis. However, equally well-known fiction writer Bobbie Ann Mason’s ode to the main tourist attraction in her hometown of Mayfield, Kentucky—a group of seven statues called “The Strange Procession That Never Moves”—never gets moving. Each paragraph is like a chip off a block of unadorned information.
Still, all the odes together have a cumulative effect that will please anyone interested in Southern culture. And, even if they’re not all completely up to snuff, this collection makes those typical, cheesy “Best of” lists feel like the first cold night of the year in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.—Doug Nordfors