Fantasy Turns Into Work of Art at Sushi

Sheril Cunning grew up in the golden age of movie musicals, harboring fantasies about dancing cheek-to-cheek with debonair Fred Astaire.

In time, Cunning became a successful artist and writer, creating artworks from a studio in Escondido and teaching at Palomar College and other West Coast art centers. Her multimedia works have been exhibited throughout the United States, in several European countries and in Israel and Japan.

A pioneer in the field of paper making, Cunning invented both the processes and the equipment for utilizing indigenous plant fibers, and her book “Handmade Paper: A Practical Guide to Oriental and Western Techniques” is used in classrooms throughout the United States and Canada.

Through those busy and productive years, Cunning kept her girlhood fantasies locked away in the recesses of her mind. However, when a serious illness threatened to curtail her career--and her life--a short time ago, the hidden fantasies began to surface. They triggered a burst of creative energy that culminated in a highly personal wall construction now on exhibit at the downtown Sushi studio.

“My first objective was to do the very best work I could do, to please only me, in case it was my swan song. And it came out just the way I wanted it,” Cunning said.

Titled “Time Out: The Legend of Stella by Starlight,” the multimedia work defies description in familiar terms. But Sushi is calling the multi-sectioned assemblage “a visual opera” in which the “actors” evolve from many media sources to play out new roles on unique “stages” that enhance the drama of the legend. The artist describes it as “a new legend for an anxious age.”

What does all this mean?

The Stella in the title is a throwback to Stella Dallas of radio soap opera fame, a continuing character in Cunning’s work created as an alter ego to explain the chaos of our daily existence.

At the suggestion of a New York poet, Cunning veered off in a new direction from the angry, politicized Stella to “present another being”--a manifestation of her fertile imagination that was “partly autobiographical and part scientific theory,” she said.

The “scientific” side of this visual opera was inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, a theory that says the earth and its inhabitants are a total living organism, and postulates an underlying pattern of order beneath apparent chaos.

“The Gaia hypothesis just grabbed my imagination and then that just solidified my images,” Cunning said. “It was a conscious decision to leave the soap opera Stella and become Stella something else.

“Music and dance have always been a big influence in my life, so I represent Fred Astaire as an archangel and Stella by Starlight as an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ character in the center of a threatening void.”

The void that engulfs Stella in the first section of the work is a psychedelic-colored spiral that confronts the viewer boldly as the steep stairway to Sushi’s second-story gallery is ascended.

Surrounded by stars and Astaire, of course, the heroine hovers precariously in the midst of the frightening vortex. The rest of the story unfolds in separate, numbered panels on the gallery walls. A textual complement to the visuals, written by the artist, reads:

“On the night of the Harmonic Convergence, Stella was kicked in the head by a cosmic mule. . . . “

“I like opera and Greek choruses,” said Cunning, “but it doesn’t matter if you make the connection with the text.”

Because of serious bouts with vertigo, Cunning eschewed painting and returned to printing on silk-screen for the ambitious work, reducing or enlarging found images whenever necessary to achieve the effect. The images were then hand-painted, coated with glitter and mounted.

“These are all hand-cut,” she said, pointing to a geometric design, “and the room was spinning the whole time while I was cutting. I wanted to quit, because I was so dizzy, but I just had to continue.”

Cunning made heavy use of rubber stamps and black velvet--materials strongly associated with ersatz art.

Some of the individual panels resemble Russian icons, but the figures could have stepped right out of “Alice in Wonderland” or some surrealistic landscape. Birds and monkeys abound, along with dead fish, prairie dogs, butterflies, sweet potatoes and gargoyles.

The creatures are all rather benign, however.

“It’s not a downer, it’s a healer,” said Cunning. “The figures are not meant to be menacing.”

Many of the images in the work recur excessively. The symbolism is often heavy-handed (rose-colored glasses are depicted as glasses with roses on the lenses), and Cunning’s choice of materials is deliberately controversial. But Cunning believes her illness has given her new insights.

“You can be off balance and still see things clearly,” she said. “In fact, if you’re slightly askew, you see things in a different perspective.”

The last sentence in her narrative says it best:

“And she resolves to purposefully use her inability to keep her balance as a positive force of change.”

Cunning’s construction will be on exhibit at Sushi from noon to 4 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through June 30.