TRAGIC YET PLAYFUL The art of Karen Lewis
|
The story of Johann Christian Woyzeck goes like this: A German man born into poverty in the late 18th century tries his hand in several professions. Handicapped by a schizophrenia unrecognized by most at the time, he eventually becomes a soldier. On June 13, 1821, he is arrested for the murder of his wife, whom he stabbed out of jealousy. He is later deemed sane by his examiners, and executed for his actions.
Georg Buchner adapted Woyzeck's story for his 1837 play, Woyzeck, which remained incomplete at his death; but picked up by numerous other playwrights and artists, it has become a staple in German theater, as well as a 1979 film by Werner Herzog. In 1925 Alban Berg first performed his opera Wozzeck, further adapted from 15 fragments he selected from Buchner's unfinished work.
In her multimedia catharsis of an obsession with Berg's opera, Karen Lewis filters the tragedy through a personal lens, removing language almost entirely from her interpretation. She relies instead on the narrative and dramatic weight of 15 photographs (correlating with the 15 scenes in the opera) art objects, sound stations, film, theatrical props, and installation, and a live performance including ballet and karaoke. A supplemental synopsis of the scenes and musical forms in the opera roots Lewis's representation to Berg's work, but otherwise the display is a fragmented and intimate response to the themes of love, alienation, oppression, and madness.
Lewis's C-prints, all 30 by 30 inches, are casually nailed to the wall in the Loft Gallery, unframed. The prints are the focal point as well as the highlight of the show, reading like film stills, moody and cinematic. Using a consistent color scheme that is simultaneously drab and saturated, and descriptively strong light sources, the images drift between dreamscape and nostalgia, theater and reality. Each photograph presents the key characters of a scene, but captures more a psychological essence of the events than an actual narrative. Her compositions are both active and repressed, resulting in an eerie suggestion of quelled disturbance, a sensation well matched to Berg's atonal music, and reiterated in a film projected on the far wall of the gallery. The muted film is edited in a raw, new wave-y manner, sometimes acting as a live version of the moments captured in the stills, with the models posing, staring directly at the camera while the wind blows or children play around them; and otherwise presenting the moments in the story between the captured stills.
Aesthetically, despite the gravity of the subject matter, Lewis is playful with a whimsical and at times ironic stroke. A papier-mâché deer accompanies a stoic portrait of Wozzeck, his wife, and his child, and though most of the sound stations play records of German folk songs or language instruction, one station boasts '70s Love Songs, and is playing Air Supply. Peas are a quirky motif throughout the exhibit, as pea green is a dominant color in the photographs, evoking poverty and military drab; sweet-pea cans line the molding in the stairwell leading up to the gallery, and a large jar of sickly-looking preserved peas sits on a pedestal in the center of the gallery. Lewis is inviting the viewer into her "Beautiful Obsession," allowing us to enter her personal experience with the opera, and the bizarre free-associations she connects to Berg's work that complete her attachment to it.
Annie Larmon can be reached at aglarmon@gmail.com.
"KAREN LEWIS: 'WOZZECK" — MY BEAUTIFUL OBSESSION" |Through October 3 | at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, 162 Russell Ave, Rockport | 207.236.2875
