Artist Fills History Gaps With Lessons

Deborah Small is as much a teacher as an artist, a teacher of remedial history who identifies gaps in our understanding of the past, provides information for filling those gaps, and, implicitly, urges us to scrutinize why such gaps occur in the first place.

She is an example of one of the most effective kinds of teachers. She presents her material in a fresh, dynamic manner, never wrapping it in a falsely neat, compact package. Rather, she presents history as the amalgam of loose ends that it truly is, and the critical process that we use to make sense of those fragments, to tie them together, is internal, essential to our personal and political sensibility. Small does nothing less than nurture our ability to perceive injustices, contradictions and cover-ups on the grand scale of world history.

Small’s newest work, “MACONAQUA/Frances Slocum,” at the Linda Moore Gallery, is her fourth installation to focus on captivity narratives, the tales of whites captured by Indians and brought to live among them. In each, she has deftly aligned visual and verbal accounts from different periods and perspectives on hundreds of panels and shelves, and mounted them grid-like on walls. It is history as seen through a prism, rather than a telescope. “MACONAQUA,” like the others in the ongoing series that have been on view in separate shows locally and nation ally over the past few years, is an intelligent, intriguing piece of work.

Frances Slocum (1773-1847) was captured at the age of five from her home in Pennsylvania and adopted by a Delaware Indian family. Though by her own account her capture was traumatic, she adjusted to her new community, assumed the name Maconaqua, and lived happily with the Indians until her death. When she was in her 60s, her white siblings located her and interviewed her. The resulting narrative was published in 1842 as “The Lost Sister of the Wyoming.”

Small, who lives in San Diego, includes excerpts from the book’s index and opening pages on panels in her “MACONAQUA” installation. She juxtaposes these, in the manner of a dense but orderly mosaic, with reproductions of Edward Hicks’ painting, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” a glorified vision of people and nature in harmony. In another section of the work, Hicks’ benign painting of William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians neighbors the text of a 1756 proclamation of war against them. Outlined in the text is the bounty structure for capture and murder of Indian men, women and children.

Dominating the central section of the installation are snippets from Slocum’s narrative, Delaware Indian pictographs, an unidentified Indian poem and a lush spread of images of forests, plants and animals. Small has also arranged tree trunks and ferns in the gallery as set pieces for these clashing narratives. While one image idealizes the indigenous lifestyle, another condemns it as barbaric. At one moment the Indians are allies, at another, enemies.

Slocum’s own words provide the most poignant interlude in this array of observations, proclamations and interpretations. “I am an old tree,” she said. “I was a sapling when they took me away. It is all gone past. I am happy here. . . . This is my home. . . . I should not be happy with my white relatives. I am glad enough to see them but I can not go.” Such narrative fragments carry the weight of direct testimony, evidence contradicting the stereotypical, hostile views of native Americans held by most white settlers at the time, and harbored still by many of their descendants.

The interplay of forces across this vibrant wall is thick with connotation and understated tension. The installation is milder, in fact, than much of Small’s work, but consistent with the artist’s activist stance against injustice. Here, as elsewhere, Small introduces sources that help explain the cruel legacies we live with and go far to dismantle them.

* “MACONAQUA/Frances Slocum” is part of IN/SITE 92, and continues at the Linda Moore Gallery, 1611 West Lewis St., through Nov. 22. Hours are Wednesday through Friday noon-5 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m.-3 p.m. and by appointment (260-1101).

Radiant drawings by local artist Merilyn Britt and enigmatic paintings by San Franciscan Timothy Berry combine forces to make “Metaphors,” at the Porter Randall Gallery, a provocative and highly beautiful show.

Britt’s untitled works in gouache and pencil celebrate the female form as eternal, organic and fertile. Comparing a woman’s body with a vessel, and vaguely drawing it as such, Britt implies both to be strong, capable, enduring and life-giving. The images in her drawings are not closed systems, objects with clear contours, insides and outsides, but rather visions that fuse the idea of the vessel with that of woman, the vital skeins of a leaf with the full flesh of a woman’s breast.

Though some of the works verge on the literal, most are engagingly suggestive of that metaphoric middle ground where identities blur and overlap. Delicately drawn, they show skins, roots, shells, veins, leaves, blossoms and scales as if continually evolving out of the same basic matter. A brilliant light that can only be described as mystical or spiritual emanates from several of the images. This is feminism free of politics and high theory, a reverent ode to the integrity--physical, spiritual and otherwise--that defines woman.

Berry’s paintings in oil and wax on wood feel much like excavations in progress. Within their layered surfaces are suggestions of different worlds and different eras. Opaque and translucent swathes of color set the stage for floating cues, organic and mechanical, hints of nature, evidence of culture. Berry conjures a sculptural quality from his materials, sometimes painting directly on the smoothly planed wood, and sometimes building up the surface like frosting. These varying depths reinforce the sense of fluid, transitional time.

There is a slowness to the paintings, as if Berry was entranced by the viscosity of time itself and how mementos and ideas equally get trapped and conflated in its steady flow. Berry, who lives in San Francisco, floods his paintings with the air of antiquity, giving them an aloof, refined beauty that is also highly sensual.

* “Metaphors” continues at the Porter Randall Gallery, 5624 La Jolla Blvd., through Nov. 28. Hours are Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturday noon-5 p.m. and by appointment (551-8884).

CRITIC’S CHOICE

KENNETH CAPPS IN N.Y.

Local sculptor Kenneth Capps opens a show of his work at the Vera Engelhorn Gallery in New York on Nov. 7. . . .

Grace Gray Adams, of Encinitas, recently closed her exhibition, “Project Parent,” at the art gallery of Biola University in La Mirada.