Wild blue skies

Annette Lemieux breaks through the "Wall at WAM"

by Randi Hopkins

ANNETTE LEMIEUX: TWO VISTAS
At the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, through June.

When Annette Lemieux was invited to be the third artist to create a "Wall at WAM" for the Worcester Art Museum's grand Renaissance Court last fall, both she and curator Susan Stoops originally envisioned a monumental version of Lemieux's brick walls -- an image the artist has explored in many media, from rubber stamp on paper to oil on canvas to actual bricks. But as soon as she walked into the large, Italian palazzo-styled hall, Lemieux had a new idea. As she describes it, "the room needed a vista." With that, Lemieux set about to paint a powerful contemporary sky for the decidedly non-contemporary space.

The finished project, titled Two Vistas, covers an expanse 67 feet long and 20 feet high. Like the natural sky, it is evocative and moody -- the colors recall the green-gray of the sky after a storm, and the images seem to move swiftly across the space from left to right. A dark break in the clouds might be the nose socket of a skull, or the plump legs of a doughboy; a fluffy strip comes to look like California, or a drumstick. But the naturalistic illusion is disrupted when we realize that we're looking at two identical skyscapes placed side by side. We experience not only the image itself, with its many interpretive possibilities, but also a copy of the image.

The duality forces us to scrutinize both images in a different way. Are they exactly the same? How have they been duplicated -- by hand or through mechanical or photographic means? The horizontal sweep of the broad image is interrupted, and so is the viewer's contemplation of the subject of the painting -- the sky. Instead, we search for evidence of the artist's hand, busily trying to locate a fixed point in the swirling cloud on the left to compare with its twin on the right. Because the image is doubled, we must acknowledge that Two Vistas is not merely a depiction of nature, in which case a large photograph or a monumental single image would have served. Lemieux has something else in mind here. Her doubled view provokes a complex of reactions that draw on our experiences of nature, art history, and architecture, at the least.

Two Vistas was made over the course of a three-week residency at the museum, during which time the Renaissance Court was transformed into an artist's studio and the public was invited to watch Lemieux at work. She completed the wall painting with the help of Worcester artist and commercial sign painter John Smith, who airbrushed each skyscape onto the wall from atop a scaffold as she directed him from the balcony, using a laser pointer. "I was his eyes and he was my hands," is the way Lemieux describes the process. The painting is based on a photograph Lemieux took of the sky over Allston, where she has her studio. She began photographing the ocean and the sky in the late 1990s, after her work with the image of brick walls led her to the idea of breaking through these walls, first with abstract blocks of blue and then with representational imagery.

Lemieux has become well established on the international art scene over the past two decades: she was recently selected to participate in this year's Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, her second appearance in this prestigious exhibition (the first was in 1987). Famous for working in whatever material, and in whatever style, a particular idea demands, she has exhibited photography, paintings, sculpture, and mixed-media installations. Because she has deliberately avoided a "signature style," her audience is encouraged to concentrate on the unifying ideas of her work, rather than on her diverse methods, media, and styles. Two Vistas combines two of Lemieux's characteristic gifts: her affinity for simple images and forms that are particularly rich in associations (the brick wall, the army helmet, the sole of a shoe), and her keen radar for double meanings and other types of duality in language and in imagery. In this case, those dualities include inside and outside, abstraction and representation, photography and painting, science and art, and singleness and doubleness.

Surprisingly for such a huge work, Two Vistas does not loudly call attention to itself. Instead, it is integrated into the courtyard in a graceful, natural way, its muted colors blending warmly with the walls, columns, and arches. It seems to open up the room and the viewer's senses in a liberating way, rather than bearing down with Sturm und Drang. Most dramatically, it creates a sense of movement -- another duality, setting the swirling motion inherent in the image and the paint handling against the viewer's own ability to experience the work from the ground, the stairs, or the upstairs balcony. The result is well worth a visit.