For the first time since I was a teenager I went, on the second Sunday in Advent, to Vespers at Davidson College.  I had forgotten how splendid an event  it is.  The Davidson College Chorale, Brass Ensemble and String Ensemble as well as the organist, offered a beautifully constructed musical service that ranged across centuries.  It was as spectacular an art experience as I have had in a long time.

The harmonies in the musical invocation “Oh Come All Ye Faithful, both orchestral and choral, were  ecstatic.  The service started on that kind of edge , where we glimpse the enormity of our human experience. Just remembering the power of those voices in that huge space draws me into a sacred space.  It makes me think that if we can bless ourselves in this way, then the small things, and even some of the big ones, that torment us are unimportant, dwarfed as they are by our huge seeking spirits.

The final anthem was composed by Jennifer Stasack, of Davidson’s music faculty.  It began as one might expect.  The chorale’s voices joined, but quickly deconstructed into individuated parts.  The many voices pulling apart from the whole reconnected to create a woven three-dimensional experience.  I was keenly aware of each piece of its warp and woof, and surprised by my sense of its materiality.  Later in the week I heard an artist discussing the concept of a sound sculpture.  That struck me as an apt description of what I had heard in Jennifer’s evocative, haunting, woven piece.

Strange to think that on the main street of a small southern town on a December evening an experience of such enormity was given to me, and anyone else who took the time to take a seat and listen.

Rebekah's animated hand impression

Every year I look forward to the fall opening of the Visual Arts Center at Davidson College. It’s the occasion of the faculty show, and a lot of fun, seeing old friends and new art.  It’s a last vivid summer art memory before the chill of fall sets in.  Tonight was appropriately sultry and rich.  http://www3.davidson.edu/cms/x25463.xml

RebekahTolley is new to the faculty and was exhibiting tonight.  She is a printmaker who is concerned with exploration.  I was privileged to hear her very brief but evocative talk.  In just a few minutes she managed to spark my imagination in a dozen ways.  She touched on the idea that printmakers today seldom make editions, being less inclined to quality control and consistency than to experimentation.  Also touching on the role of the found object in her work, she showed a piece of worm-infested wood she had rolled up with ink and layered over an image of her hands.  The key word she played with in the talk was “impression”.  One piece recorded a crab’s shell– “the impression the crab has left of itself”,  just as prints are referred to as “impressions”.  Rebekah also talked about her use of morphing software to create  progression, taking her images in the direction of animation.  I was particularly taken by an elegant piece with moving hands.

Cristina Toro, who lives in upstate New York, was showing her new paintings in the smaller gallery.  Cristina is a friend, and I knew her work would be wonderful, but I wasn’t prepared for how wonderful it would be. Turning into the gallery felt like walking into a jewel box or a sultan’s tent.   Like everyone in my family, she is fascinated by pattern, and her work is a combination of the balancing of bright, but modulated colored boxes, on which appear fanciful figures.  There is dancing rhythm, humor, intimacy, narrative, all rendered in fields of flat color covered  with pattern …  Persian miniatures writ large.  There were passages that might have been whole paintings, but instead they rested in the midst of a crazy quilt picnic blanket laid for a feast.  It was the Coat of Many Colors.  It dazzled.  Best of all, it exposed something of the life and times of Cristina.  It felt like a heart-to-heart talk, like reading her journal.

detail from a painting by Cristina