" Ali: The Texture of Still Life " and " Mark Davis: Color and Form in Motion "
At the Pucker Gallery December 1 through January 8; opening reception December 1 from 3 to 6 p.m.

T.S. Eliot didn’t have either Ali or Mark Davis in mind when he wrote Four Quartets, but I suspect he would have appreciated the work that will go up at the Pucker Gallery this Saturday. Eliot’s four poems deal with time and space, with our movement through space in time, with the interception of time by eternity, time as chronos and time as kairos. Unlike most art, which appears frozen in time (though it moves perpetually in its stillness), Mark Davis’s mobiles are perpetually on the brink of motion; just a touch sets them going. Ali’s " cloth paintings, " mostly still lifes fashioned out of fabric, look stillborn (the French term for this genre is nature morte), but with their old photos and unsettling spatial perspectives, they roll time past into time future, and her central metaphor, a table, reminds us that home is indeed where we start from.

Alison Cann-Clift has traveled through an unusual set of incarnations: born in Nova Scotia, moved to Cuba with her parents, moved to Florida after the Revolution, studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in the ’60s, married Jack Clift, an instructor there, spent time in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her use of fabric to imitate painting is distinctive, yet it recedes behind the audacity of her subject matter, a subtle reminder that fabric and not paint is the stuff of all life. Her early work was influenced by the circuses she saw in Cuba, tiny figures adrift under the big top of existence, their tightrope walking and jumping through fiery hoops scarcely perceptible in the big picture. Over the past 10 years she’s settled into a deceptive domestic tranquillity. A typical Ali work will have a table covered with a flowered tablecloth; on top, fruit, a jug or vase with real flowers (most recently stargazer lilies and carnations), old photographs or letters, perhaps a clay pot. Behind it a window or door will open out onto a parched landscape with stunted telephone poles or palm trees and more tiny, indistinct figures standing or walking in solitary confinement. Light casts unexpected shadows; sometimes it’s striated ( " Sudden in a shaft of sunlight " ), as if demarcating the intermittent intersection of the timeless with time. The Ofrendas ( " Offerings " ) series alludes to the Day of the Dead (November 2) observances in Mexico; the Monuments series conjures Giorgio de Chirico in its depiction of past glory and ruined present. Laden with sustenance and beauty and memory, Ali’s nurturing tables attempt to ground us, but they’re undermined by her nightmare perspective, and the wasteland that lies beyond offers no consolation ( " They all go into the dark " ).

Her recent works find her moving in even more-unnerving directions. After Carnival is a variation on her use of Day of the Dead masks. A table outside fills most of the frame, and we’re looking at it from a low point of view, so we can’t see the tabletop or what’s behind. It’s covered with two cloths, one large, one small, and on top lie two masks, one a clown’s, the other face down. After midnight strikes and the carnival of life ends, we disappear; only our masks remain.

A Special Place has us staring into an empty room with an orange-and-black linoleum floor and flowered wallpaper and facing a doorway that discloses the usual desert with palm trees and stunted figures. Light from the doorway bestows a Vermeer-like redemption on a portion of the floor; on the left wall blocks of light are cast from an unseen window, and there are streaks of light everywhere, as if from a planetarium. But this " special place " has no table, no furniture of any kind, and no transition into the outside — we simply tumble through the doorway.

The Dress is more precipitous still. Here we’re brought up close to a half-open door, so that we don’t see the room at all. Again there’s the usual desert landscape, this time with telephone poles and wires (where do they lead to?). But the focus of our attention is the child’s dress that’s hanging from a hook on the door, a party dress with ruffles and puffed short sleeves and a round collar, but gray in color (like the door), like children’s laughter fading into the air. Light from outside falls on part of the door and the dress; the shadow of a chair is visible on the right-hand wall, and there’s light streaming through windows and scattered streaks. Life lies outside the frame; what’s inside poses only questions, like why this dress is hanging on an outside door, why the door opens out, and why the house seems to be standing on a cliff.

The Letter returns us to Ali’s tabletop world, but it’s no less mystifying. This table, wooden, with no cloth, is pushed up against a window with lace curtains (real lace, of course), one of which is actually in front of the table, obscuring a red vase with stargazer lilies, a few fallen petals, and part of a letter; on the part of the table that’s in view lies a single red carnation. Jack Clift died in 1999, after a long illness; perhaps he’s represented by the carnation and the letter. The words are illegible, and the lilies are veiled: Jack not fully revealed to us, perhaps not even to Ali. The fallen lily petals ( " No end to the withering of withered flowers " ) might represent the erosion of memory, as if even that were not timeproof.

September, her newest work, moves the table back outside; again we’re close up and low down. There’s the flowered cloth (so we don’t see the form of the table), and a jug painted with the Mexican flag that’s holding red carnations, probably a reference to Jack. But a strong wind is blowing the cloth, and some petals off the carnations (always cut flowers, never a living plant), and some sheets from a letter ( " bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind/That blows before and after time " ). At the top of one sheet you can make out the date: September 11. Is this the wind of the dove with the flickering tongue in Little Gidding, where death-dealing airplanes double as the Holy Spirit? Or is it simply blowing us irretrievably into the past?

Just out in time to accompany " The Texture of Still Life " is Ali: Paintings of the Last Decade: Still Life (Pucker Art Publications, 84 pages, $45), which is illustrated, in handsome full color, by 48 cloth paintings and 15 of her chine collé monotypes and has some acute observations from Alicia Craig Faxon. Ali will be present at the opening reception for these twin shows this Saturday.

MARK DAVIS’S CREATIONS are like what Eliot says old men should be: explorers, always " moving/Into another intensity/For a further union, a deeper communion, " with no end and, seemingly, no beginning. They don’t stand on their bases; they grow out of them, organically. Some, Romanesque-like, hurl mass into space; some take the Gothic approach and use space to define mass. With their warm, primary colors and curvilinear forms, Contented Dragon, You Are the One, A Glow in the Distance, and Joyful look like Paul Klee or Joan Miró creatures come to three-dimensional life, all kingfisher’s wings and winter lightning. Toward the Heavens and Origins, on the other hand, could be illustrations of the latest innovations in superstring theory, mystic and by no means impossible unions of spheres of existence. There seems no end to Davis’s inventiveness; using wood, brass, steel, aluminum, and acrylic and lacquer colors, he improvises with Bach-like virtuosity, and his work resonates with the body’s harmonic overtones ( " you are the music while the music lasts " ) — maybe the universe’s as well. He too will be present at the reception this Saturday.

Issue Date: November 29 - December 6, 2001

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