by David James
Davis-Dominguez Gallery at 154 E. 6th Street in Tucson knocks it out of the park through February 23rd with a challenging and lovely vision. The show is called post-modern dialogue. See this work! I loved the shadows and edges and every one of the things that glowed and floated and danced in this exhibition. Carrie Seid exhibits wall sculptures that are more like painting within their own soul reflections. Symmetry, allusions to nature and glowing mandalas appear to be lit from inside their cases in Seid’s work. David Mazza from Colorado shows steel sculptures that tilt and animate the space of the gallery in ways beautiful and strong.
Pamela Marks, a University of Arizona MFA, has a tender way with both books and painting. Her intimate paintings on top of book pages are handsome and stylish and quite beautiful until the viewer discovers that they are on top of old pages from a 1970’s book on environmental Armageddon and then suddenly realizes that among all this beauty one may be witnessing terror, nearly universal sorrow and over five decades of unheeded truths.
Anchoring the exhibition with pure abstraction and absolute wizardry is the work of long time Tucsonan David Pennington. These paintings both steal and steel one’s imagination. They hold the exhibition together with a messy kind of discipline that ends up as reflection and meditation. Worldly, nearly maniacally peaceful and beautifully energetic these paintings are wise and hip enough to generic pictorial conventions to ignore them while also to finding redemption in them. This is classical modernism with an attitude. This show is a shining achievement. Quite simply it is extremely brave work. It doesn’t bely a philosophy exactly (that I can detect anyway). But these paintings dare you with sparkles amidst horizon lines or opposing fields of paint in a sort of very firm resolution not to give away any artist secrets. They are not confrontational, but they say so much about confronting our visions our dreams and our best selves as they mirror us, as they shadow us. This artist looks at the world in a very particular and knowledgeable way and it shows. The paintings also trust you and are just silent enough to allow one space. Take as much time as you want to look at this work.
The gallery is quiet and inspiring. I found myself going back to Pennington’s paintings again and again and again. If you can allow it, they will mediate your troubles for you. As a viewer I felt like all of the hard work had already been accomplished. All I had to do was to try to see and enjoy. It is an exquisite show. See it for sure. Make art if you want to, buy art if you can, support art and artists for our children and families and to make our world a better place my friends.
