"Side by Side: an exhibition of new work by Isabel Chicquor," Through This Lens Gallery, 303 E. Chapel Hill St., Durham, through Feb. 13. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Friday 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturdays 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. For information, call 687-0250.
Isabel Chicquor is the consummate teacher; whether she is in the classroom or in the gallery, she invites the listener/viewer to a new understanding. In this show, she pairs images, without titles or words, and teases us to find the meaning.
Every one of Chicquor's images is readable. We understand the interior of a church, a woman smoking, a nun snapping a photograph, even a single Swiss guard, and that is the way she entices us. You know these pictures, but why has the artist coupled them? Is it as simple as similar colors or people doing the same thing in a different setting, or is it more complicated?
For instance, in her pairing of an adobe building on the left with a narrow stone street that angles up dramatically on the right, what are we to think? There is no mistaking the adobe building although we only get a small piece of it; we see the frame of a doorway partially hidden by a wall and the whole is suffused with a sandy rose color. But what of the other half? Is the narrow passageway between the grey stone walls of two buildings an escape route? Is it a shortcut? Or is it too claustrophobic? Is the doorway of the adobe building related to the narrowed opening at the top of the cobbled stone street? The artist does not give us a clue; it is up to us to find the answer.
Even without the mystery, the diptych is aesthetically pleasing. Chicquor sets the desert pinks against the grey street stones; the rounded curves of the building are a soft contrast to the stark angular edges of the city walls and the real delight are the figures in sharp detail at the tiny opening at the top of the street.
Another pair which gave me a long pause while I imagined a possible story were the single woman, smoking at a restaurant, and a single man, in a restaurant, as a mirror image. The photograph of the woman is in black and white; the man, in color. She was photographed with film; he was photographed digitally. I disregarded the differences in finish. I saw them as a couple, having a glass of wine and a cigarette at the end of the day. Were they married, sweethearts, business acquaintances or were they in two totally separate places?
I spoke with Chicquor by phone and she took away all the mysteries about place and time. As she envisioned from the beginning, if we know too much, the photographs are not as much fun. They would still be wonderful images, but guessing about what is going on is part of the process of seeing and learning.
She talked about these pairings as constructions of meaning and said the images come from her files, but are fairly recent, going back only to 2006. For example, in the two smokers, she photographed the woman in Tuscany a few years ago; she photographed the man in Montreal last summer. When I asked her whether she thought about the image of the woman when she took the man's picture, she said no.
After she had contracted with Roylee Duvall of Through This Lens to do a show of large images, the genesis of the show began when a couple of photographs accidentally came together in downloading some files. When she saw these images together it sparked the idea of pairing certain photographs. Chicqor has traveled to many places and some of the images from those places are part of this show: Istanbul, Montreal, Rome, The Dominican Republic and Cuba for starters.
Other pairings to think about are Christo's orange flags set beside an ornate cathedral, glowing in deep oranges and red; homemade angels inside a church meeting hall contrasted with a stone angel on the parapet of a church; a Swiss Guard on the left and, on the right, a line of Egyptian animal gods sitting in a majestic line outside some ancient temple.
Chicquor began her artistic life in New York City as a very young student at the Art Students League and then the High School of Music And Art. Her undergraduate and graduate degrees are in ceramics from Alfred University and more recently she earned a degree in Imaging Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology. Photography has been her main vehicle for artistic expression since 1984. She recently retired from a long career in the art department at North Carolina Central University.
During the late 1970s, she and 12 other women artists established Center Gallery, the first women's art cooperative in North Carolina. Spurred on by feminist ideas, she did a series of life size plaster sculptures, celebrating or complaining about women's traditional roles. They were spectacular and of the moment. By 1984 the women's movement had made its mark and the participants moved on.
Chicquor has been honored over and over by her university and with regional and national awards for her art. She has more time now to do her art; I cannot imagine her sitting still.
Blue Greenberg's column appears each week in Entertainment and More. She can be reached at blueg@bellsouth.net or by writing her in c/o The Herald-Sun, P.O. Box 2092, Durham, NC 27702.
