‘Pasajero’

Pasajero: Flight of a Lifetime

Women & Their Work Gallery,

through May 12

Most installation artists aim to shock by putting freaky things into art galleries. In her new exhibit at Women & Their Work Gallery, Connie Arismendi installs a quality ignored by most of her contemporaries: beauty. Passing life, history's journey, and the agony of reflection all challenge the artist to present the fleeting moment of beauty. Plain materials from everyday households -- paper, steel, wax, stone, glass, and gauze -- shine like priceless metals, gems, and cloths.

As if to mark her territory, Arismendi refuses to shock the eye in the manner of most installations with her first work; rather, La Voz de Pajarito ("The Bird Voice"), a silkscreen print in the antechamber, eases the viewer into the complex themes of the exhibition. On a wallpaper-y surface sits an image of a singing bird printed in shaded silhouette, starting black at the beak, fading to blue in the tail feathers. Blue swirls of water move in the pale background. This bird's song disappears with the swirls; nature replaces its glories every moment.

The title of Arismendi's show, "Pasajero," has a number of meanings in Spanish. "The flight of a bird, a place that is visited frequently, traveler" were a few cited by the artist at the opening. For anyone with itchy feet and no means, Women & Their Work Gallery will be a good port of call. Arismendi simulates the experience of traveling, opening her life to the art tourist.

The movement in this show reflects the sacramental journey of the Catholic religious life, beginning with the fire of baptism (in the silkscreen print La Vida en el Espejo, "Life in the Mirror") through several sacraments, including marriage (the installation La Vida en el Espejo, which features a mirror draped with a gauze veil bearing a painted flame -- the formality of marriage merged with the passion of youth), and ending with the ointment of the last rites (the installation Clemencia, "Mercy," in which a hundred plastic teardrops dangling from the wall form one large teardrop suspended over a tiny font bearing real water).

The centerpiece, El Arbol de Mi Vida (The Tree of My Life), brings together two strangers: drawing and installation. The installation is a rusted steel candelabra with branches arranged like a tree and roots spread amongst green stones and birdseed at its base. Photographic pencil drawings of family moments -- Arismendi's husband running, her mother dying, her niece's birthday and her own wedding -- find their places on the curved surface of white candles. Arismendi wonders at the ephemeral, transitory nature of life. Imagine heaven as a floating family album.

In Catholicism, a candle burns for an eternal soul, representing infinite hope. But candles also burn to nothing. In Arismendi's cosmology, they represent both the mighty infinite and the vulnerable finite. Something very daring sashays in these immaculate drawings on wax, like dancing on flames or spinning gun chambers for sport. The Doctor Zhivago idea of the candle may also be contained: a light tended for a loved one, sign that they are awaited. The circle of stones surrounding the base carry the warmth of green with the cold of marble.

The viewer travels not only through periods of Arismendi's life but through periods of art history: treated plastic, a mirror as decadent as Louis XIV, a candelabra inspired by a Gothic cathedral, a primal bird in flight; all could be symbols of eras, yet all belong to the 21st century, too.

La Voz de Pajarito, Recuerda, "The Bird Voice, Memory" echoes the first exhibit, just as old age echoes infancy. A high charged light bulb projects the real size of a metal bird as a shadow on the wall. A two-dimensional shape casts the same shadow as a flesh-and-blood bird. Arismendi hits memory and nature with one stone.

If anything, Arismendi reflects sadnesses and joys with too much beauty. Some observers may miss grit. For them, the high-rise parking lots outside can provide balance.