BRATTLEBORO
Dana Wigdor is well known for her hovercraft beings suspended in time and encapsulated in the cool ice-lit space of winter landscapes.

Her delightfully bizarre beings have been called “UFOs”, and if they were displayed on billboards, her paintings would stop traffic – and evoking the H.G. Wells radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” – there would be panic in the streets of Brattleboro.  In her upcoming show, “Earth and Sky,” Wigdor gives us an additional facet of the artist’s vision.


Opening April 1 at the Windham Art Gallery, Wigdor’s show presents a body of new work.  Her paintings draw the viewer into her timeless worlds by means of illuminated breaks in the woods, ghostly stairways through golden fields, and vertical shafts of light cut and rearranged like a cathedral of diamonds.  And fans of her extraterrestrial beings will find new machinations of encounters with another dimension.
Supported by a grant from the Vermont Arts Council, this show bridges the artistic visions of painter and photographer.

The show is a tribute to Wigdor’s Aunt, the photographer and violinist Nancy King of Northfield, Mass.  King died last October, leaving a photographic legacy that includes award-winning images of landscapes, farms and sheep.  Her images have graced the cover of Sheep Magazine and appeared in Sea Kayaker Magazine.  Before her death, she expressed her wish to do a show with her niece, and Wigdor has honored her Aunt with a visual conversation.
In her painting, “Bridge”, Wigdor brings the nostalgia of her grandparent’s family farm in Amherst, Mass., back to life.

It is a broadly brushed work painted in response to her Aunt’s photograph of a farm in Northfield.  Facets of emerald and gold give the work a cut-jeweled effect.  The softness of her palette has expanded from her usual wintry blue and white spectrum to the startling brilliance of spring, blurring the edges of the natural and supernatural worlds.

Like the blurred vision of seeing through tear-filled eyes, this work is a blinding joy of new spring life after the death of winter’s wear and tear.  She notes, “There is an event that’s happening in the unseen world – a transparency – superimposed on the seen world.”

Nancy King showed a talent for catching supreme moments in the natural world.  Her photograph “Blink” is more of a blur, a blue cloud of a young lamb pronging in the spring air – an arched trajectory reminiscent of the nursery rhyme:  the cow jumped over the moon.

Wigdor responds by painting a canvas of sky dominating a blink of landscape, like viewing the earth from a great distance.  The work strives to create movement across the canvas in a subtly broken visual effect.  She describes it as “a quick time lapse – like a flip book – like different frames.”


Wigdor’s “View From The Swing” reveals the landscape as viewed from her Aunt’s back yard:  dark, mysterious evergreen forest with a sphere of light rising through a shaft cut through the earth’s core.  The story embraces the dichotomy of light and dark, the glazed snow permeated with a meditative starkness.  It is particularly poignant for the artist in recalling her Aunt:

“In her last weeks, I went to her house quite a bit, raked her yard, brought her food.  I saw her sitting in the swing – she was looking into that beautiful scene.  It also shows a passage from that scene, a contemplation of the beyond.  How I’ve dealt with grief:  I’ve meditated on impermanence.  Nothing lasts forever, no person, no relative, no living thing.  In my sadness, I wanted to grasp onto something I knew would last forever.  The only thing: the natural world.  I wanted to hold the hand of something that was going to last forever, that was true about life, that is nature.  Heaven is down into
the ground – there is light under the ground.”

With this show, Wigdor offers her family and community an opportunity to remember King, while providing a vehicle for Wigdor to grieve the loss of her “other mother”, who was her mother’s twin sister.  She provides her Aunt with a ghostly vehicle, the “Violin Submarine,” which seems to be searching beneath an ethereal ocean of glazed ice.  Wigdor recalls, “I wanted to make my Aunt a special craft, that was part violin.  When I was in Amherst looking at that field, it turned into an ocean.  I wanted to go underground to the ocean.  The violin (is) like a periscope, it will be bubbling under the fields of Amherst forever.”

Wigdor has expanded her work to a full palette of color.  For instance, the painting “October” shimmers with rusty tones within a quiet white and soft olive-green landscape.  There are two canvases with one smaller elongated picture hovering over the larger landscape.  She speaks of is as a “splitting off of death.”  This disconnect is dissolved in other paintings which seem to show a more settled sense of acceptance of death and grounding within the landscape paintings.
“The Night Jumpers” is a recognizable Wigdor extraterrestrial experience, depicting a blue-teal flapping contraption with a moon-like orb dominating the twilight-pearl sky.  She recalls the natural stirrings of an April night inducing this vision:  “I started it last spring listening to the peepers next to my studio.  A creature emerged with a huge balloon-like bulb coming off its back, like the expanding throat of a frog.”

Wigdor describes how her work resides somewhere between the thin membrane of this world and beyond:  “my work is always a bridge – the natural world with a supernatural world – the places in the paintings have elements of both – reflects my interest in Science Fiction, out-of-body states, certain dissociative states, the experience of lost time.”

The addition of grief in the artist’s experience is hinted in the delicacy in which she paints her new landscapes.  Shafts of light slice down into the earth while energetic spirit travels through dark forests, underwater and hovers in angular skies.  These bridges between the twin worlds of earth and sky seem to be beckoning, perhaps lighting the way.

As part of Brattleboro’s monthly Gallery Walk, there will be an opening reception, Friday, April 1, from 5 to 8p.m. Friends of Nancy King will provide live music.

Windham Art Gallery, 69 Main St., is run cooperatively by member artists from the tri-state region.  For information, call (802) 257-1881.  Gallery hours are Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, from noon to 5p.m.; and Friday and Saturday, noon to 7:30p.m.

Diana Lischer-Goodband is a local poet, and regular columnist for the Brattleboro Reformer. She can be reached at dlischer@sover.net