ART REVIEW : ‘Suspensions’: Prose Overshadows Images

When a Frenchwoman named Veronique Le Guen spent 111 days in a cave 262 feet below ground several years ago in a sensory-deprivation experiment, she had plenty of time to think about “the abyss I have inside myself”--while becoming increasingly disoriented and depressed.

Los Angeles artist Susan Silton invokes Le Guen’s experience in “Suspensions,” five works at Saddleback College Art Gallery, most of which trace melancholy journeys into a woman’s past.

The major difficulty with Silton’s work, on view through April 15, is that her abilities to set a scene, evoke a mood and address issues of love and trust are more fully developed in her prose than in her visual imagery.

In “hors du temps”-- the title alludes to the Frenchwoman’s sensation of being “out of time” in the cave--Silton inscribes hanging placards with several vivid reminiscences of childhood feelings of loneliness and insecurity.

A child abandoned on a beach towel by her father for a period of time she cannot accurately gauge sees him “disappear into the thunderous landscape of unfamiliar faces on the sand.” At another moment, sitting on a ski lift with her father, the child feels a “suffocating” loneliness, similar to her experience of seeing him every night sitting at his desk: “his back to me, a mountain I can never scale.”

The brightly colored images that accompany these texts, however, are surprisingly trite: a big hand (the child’s vision of the lifeguard who rescues her?) and a flying bird (the hoary cliche of freedom).

Even the small installation that is part of the piece--a rope ladder, a mound of earth, a twig stool--is disappointing. In a flatly literal way, it suggests Le Guen’s remote and primitive existence in the cave without adding any resonance to the central idea of the piece--the psychological “abyss” created by childhood experiences.

Another work, “innocence is suspect,” consists of a series of five hanging frame-like pieces with texts and imagery on both sides. Each side is devoted to the memories and thoughts of one member of a couple.

The man imagines the woman is having affairs with her therapist or “the man at the carwash.” The woman--who seems much more attuned to sensory information--remembers “how the air hung perfumed and deliberate,” when the man left in a cloud of Givenchy scent for what he said was a trip to the post office.

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Once again, the imagery lets the viewer down. Multiple staring eyes, multiple open hands, an old engraving of some sort of magic trick or experiment, a real piece of rope (presumably to illustrate how the woman feels “imprisoned by lack of faith”)--these things simply don’t undergo sufficient poetic transformation in Silton’s hands.

Silton’s most compact piece, “i feel what I want I want what I feel “--a double-sided gelatin silver print incorporating the text with images of hands pressed against an unseen transparent barrier--is probably her best. Although she leans on the text-and-image work of such artists as Barbara Kruger, Silton replaces their irony with the plaintive cry of someone forever distanced from the outside world, a prisoner of her own neediness.

Perhaps Silton’s work as a graphic designer--for which she has won numerous awards and attracted big-name clients--has caused her to emphasize the crisp packaging of her ideas to the detriment of subtlety and ambiguity.

It’s a pity, because she seems to have some urgent things to say, and a gift for plucking out visceral moments that evoke the pain at the heart of human relationships.

“Suspensions,” by Susan Silton, at Saddleback Art Gallery, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Hours are 12:30 to 5 p.m. Tuesday; 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Wednesday; 12:30 to 5 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday; and 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Friday. Free. (714) 582-4924.