Three artists 'Picturing Perfection' at Maya's

Featuring the work of Matthew Jordan, SY '01, Elizabeth Livingston, BR '01, and Joseph Montgomery, BK '01, Picturing Perfect, the third exhibit in a series at Maya's Room in Silliman College, offers a distinctive look into subjects that most of us might consider to be perfectly unassuming, entirely everyday, and even normal. The exhibit features nighttime painted scenes of small-town sidewalks, daytime portraits of the depersonalizing sprawl of modest suburban communities, and photographic glimpses into ordinary domestic scenes-the cat tucked under a chair leg at the breakfast table, the perfectly rolled towels adorning a bathroom, the soft morning light pouring in through a bank of windows. While the exhibit's title might suggest that these images of the quotidian attempt to capture photographic perfection, most of the works in the exhibit offer at least a tinge of imperfection, often to a resonant effect.

CHIP LOCKWOOD/YH Three photographs by Matthew Jordan.

The collection of almost miniature paintings by Livingston (five of which are 12 square inches or less) were conceived as studies in painting daytime and nighttime scenes, but they also examine the most unquestioned aspects of domestic life. As a student at the Norfolk Summer Program, Livingston painted a series of 12 night scenes in the small town of Norfolk, Mass., three of which are presented in the exhibit. One of these includes smooth, broad brushstrokes and a distant white frame house illuminated by a sort of eerie streetlight effect, suggesting something unnatural lurking behind the simple streetscape. In another, Livingston sets thick, strong, even jagged brushstrokes against strict, clean rooflines to depict a lively, well-lit small town intersection. Like a modern-day Impressionist, she injects daubs of white paint onto the third canvas to create the slightest suggestion of headlights creeping out of the obscure darkness into the orderly scene of innocuous porch lights. But can it all be so perfect? Livingston's two daytime paintings of a completely generic suburb are eerie in their own way: she purposefully seems to have sucked all the color out of the scenes, except for the hollow blue sky, the beige or gray sidings on most of the houses, and red cars and garages, much-needed yet hopelessly artificial jolts of vitality.

Like Livingston, Jordan includes two groups of work in the exhibit, but his sleek, glossy photographs are nothing like Livingston's textured, painterly scenes. For Jordan, domestic interiors are the images to study, and you're left wondering what lies beyond the sofas and the shower curtains. Jordan's photographs were conceived as direct gazes into the environments of people—men and woman, young and middle-aged—who have suffered from some sort of trauma: AIDS, divorce, depression. In a group of four photographs, Jordan looks at these interiors without their inhabitants—the empty rooms onto which people project their fears, their pains, and their joys—but Jordan also offers a group of five photographs that situate these sufferers in their natural environments. The subjects look straight at the camera, so the feeling that they are staring directly at you, and you alone, is inescapable. Every subject bears a reflective, purposeful countenance, yet nearly all of them look like they've been caught by surprise, adjusting their gaze slightly to meet your eyes. Jordan's impressive photography, especially in the skillful manipulation of depth of field that allows him to blur the body of his reclining subject but show his tanned, worn face in crisp focus, creates domestic scenes that combine the perfection of photography with the imperfection of reality in simply fascinating ways.

Unlike the paintings of Livingston and the photographs of Jordan, the more interactive work of Montgomery deals with abandonment and nothingness rather than a superficial image of domestic order: next to a group of identical paper airplanes, he places a stack of identical pages replicating the incomprehensible scribbling of a prisoner of war's journal. The top of each of Montgomery's typed pages offers a bleak observation—"This has been four days of nothing...This has been four days of war"— but below, in large, bold handwriting, the pages are signed with the name "Dwight" and the quick, unsteady scribble of a heart shape. Considering Montgomery's work along with Livingston's and Jordan's, and as the everyday trails off into the startling and the absurd, we're left to consider just how to picture perfection.

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