Husband, wife featured in first Shattuck exhibit return for gallery’s final show

Dedee Shattuck opened her namesake gallery in June 2011. The aptly named “Inaugural Exhibit” featured 36 artists, a virtual dream team of South Coast painters, sculptors, ceramicists and more. For many of the years that have since passed, new shows were exhibited monthly from April to mid-December. 

The arrival of a global pandemic fractured that rhythm, but when it relented, exhibitions returned with a regular frequency up until August 2022, when Shattuck, ready for a well-deserved retirement, mounted her last show. Called “Full Circle,” the bittersweet last “regular” exhibition reunited all of the artists that were in the first, with the exceptions of Samina Quraeshi, Marc St. Pierre and John Havens Thornton, all who had passed away in the intervening years.

The show was terrific. And that was it. Sort of.

The gallery transitioned into something else, a quieter cultural space, occasionally used for such things as musical recitals, poetry readings, yoga classes, and the occasional brief “pop-up” art show. And it will transition once again, as the building will become the Cedar Wind Center, a place for “mindful exploration and practice” led by Ben Booth. He will offer classes in tai chi, meditation and qigong. 

But that said, there is one last show. Really, really, really, I mean it this time: ONE LAST SHOW!

 “The Fluidity of Perception” features the work of two of the artists that were among the three dozen in the inaugural show, husband and wife Chris Gustin and Nancy Train Smith.

Both are ceramicists who draw inspiration from nature but remain unbeholden to it as their sensibilities shift into different but complementary realms. 

Smith, who has been an oil painter and a site-specific installation artist, has two distinct series of clay sculptures in the exhibition.

The first set includes schools of fish and flocks of birds that would be the envy of any nature lover.  But she is no Cousteau or Audubon. She makes no distinction between alewife, trout or perch. They are all generic fish. Don’t try to determine whether it’s a goldfinch or a robin or a wren. They are, in her words, “just birds.”

But they are charming. Set upon a pedestal, a stoneware sculpture from her “Departure Series” features five dark gray songbirds with a semi gloss finish. They are lifesize, smooth, devoid of eyes or feathers and look as if they may take to flight at any moment.

“Moontide #2” is a wall-mounted stoneware soft circle of dozens of intertwined ivory-colored fish tinged with yellow and pink. Their eyes are but little holes poked in the material prior to firing. It is easy to imagine it as a wreath hung on the door of an avid sport fisherman, even festooned with lights.

Smith’s “Rio Celestun ” is 3 foot tall stoneware work that deviates from the norm in much of her avian work in the rest of the show. These are no songbirds. But there are a pair of long-necked wading birds that may be egrets or cormorants.

Her second series of work continues to feel connected to the natural world but there has been a shift in approach and sensibility. The newer work has come about after she became afflicted with age-related macular degeneration (AMD or ARMD), a medical condition which can result in blurred vision in the center of the visual field.

Unable to see clearly as she once could, Smith has had to rethink how she made art. Part of the solution was to adapt an increasingly tactile sensibility. She spoke to me of approaching the clay much like a child does with a lump of Play-Doh: rolling balls of the stuff into rope or snake-like shapes that, after they are fired, look like sticks, branches, bones or antlers. 

In addition, she kneads the clay into forms that resemble leaves, flowers and shells. She then uses the components to make assemblages that resemble nests or dioramas of mysterious little worlds unto themselves. 

It should be noted that had Smith not chosen to open up about her failing vision, I would not have suspected there was an issue by simply looking at her work. It still beguiles and even as color itself has lessened in the newer and more delicate pieces, she makes up for it by fully embracing shadow and light.

She has been liberated from the tyranny of the image and in that quiet space, she has discovered something new that is a testament to the creative spirit.

Gustin displays two large ceramic sculptures in the foyer of the Shattuck but it is not until one enters the main gallery and sees the other nine, that it becomes apparent that they actually seem sociable, as if they were engaged in cocktail party conversations with each other. They enchant, they joke, they flirt, they argue, they brag, they ogle, they relent, or they stand their ground. But that just might be the pareidolia talking.

There is something inherently human about these giant amorphous stoneware things, even as they seem not quite of this world. 

Almost all of them are from Gustin’s numbered “Spirit Series.” #2315 is a brilliant cobalt blue, the obvious eyecatcher amongst the beiges, browns and grays. A close second is #2314, a bit more subdued in seafoam green, and of course, #2317, decked out in an earthy rust tone, is no slouch either.

Color commentary aside, it is the scale and shape of Gustin’s forms that demand attention. The more one looks, the more one sees. And what one sees makes it abundantly clear why the show is called “The Fluidity of Perception.” 

There is something undeniably human about these limbless beings, something that conjures a wide array of sensations, including the comic, the erotic and the horrific, sometimes all three at once.

Walking around the off-white #2313, one can imagine seeing the dual visages of Janus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings and endings, always looking forward and backward, for whom the first month is named.

Others have a comical presence, such as the one that has a resemblance to Fred Flintstone, with the cartoon caveman’s bulbous nose and solid clump of hair. Others seem to channel Ren and Stimpy and their ilk.

All of Gustin’s work consciously or otherwise references the human body, and some of them suggest a certain repulsion. Some bumps or lumps suggest parasites, cysts, tumors, things that swell, pop and ooze … the stuff of body horror. Consider the infant alien erupting from John Hurt’s chest, or William Hurt’s biological devolution in “Altered States,” or Jeff Goldblum’s transformation into the fly. Hell, read Kafka or Gogol.

But what one mostly sees in the work is a reinterpretation of the human figure, particularly the female. There appear to be womanly hips, bellies swollen with child, shapely buttocks, curved shoulders, plump breasts down to the inclusion of nipples. 

The Venus of Willendorf, a tiny fertility figure from the Paleolithic era, looms large, as does Titian’s “Venus with an Organist” (1550), Rubens’ “Venus and Adonis” (1635), Renoir’s “Venus Victorious” (1916); and Botero’s “Broadgate Venus” (1989).  

There’s nothing wrong with a little Venus envy. 

Maggie Jackson, author of “Uncertain — The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure,” will host a gallery talk with Gustin and Smith on July 11, from 5-7 p.m. at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, 1 Partner’s Lane, Westport. 

“The Fluidity of Perception” will remain on display until July 14.

Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at [email protected]

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