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BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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On This Side of Paradise by George Chacona Elizabeth Leach Gallery 207 SW Pine St., 224-0521 Ends Oct. 10 In The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne described the forest surrounding Puritan Boston as a "moral wilderness" where the unmarried lovers, Hester Prynne and the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, could freely express their affection--the source of Hester's shame and Dimmesdale's internal torment. Hester wears the scarlet "A" on her breast as a constant reminder of her adultery and proudly refuses to betray the identity of her fellow sinner, the preacher and father of their child. Dimmesdale continues to occupy his position of holy authority, revered and respected for his purity and wisdom, but his hypocrisy condemns him to a private hell. This uneasy relationship between morality and passion permeates Seattle artist George Chacona's reflection on Hawthorne's story. Chacona, 50, has been printing appropriated imagery on etched marble slabs for many years now. His sources have varied from contemporary tabloid advertisements to television to ancient Roman poetry, but his subject matter, however broad, usually points to the implausibility of innocent love. In this most recent body of work, Chacona uses the 1926 black-and-white silent film version of Hawthorne's story as the raw material for his imagery. The artist made photographs from video stills, enlarged the images, transferred them to fragmented slabs of marble and etched them in small dots analogous to the pixels on a television screen. Some of the pieces, such as Shelter Me, convey Hester (Lillian Gish) as a singular, independent female figure. Others show Hester and Arthur in deep discussion. Something to Remember You By has them kissing passionately, and Heaven's Just a Breath Away borders on the erotic. Both the MGM movie and Chacona's 14 exhibited works on marble convey the complexities and emotional range of the more famous stories of secret love, an age-old theme and current media obsession. Chacona's excerpts may be read either as part of a narrative or as independent monuments to the intimate moments in personal relationships. This portrayal of The Scarlet Letter is only one in a long line of interpretations of the narrative, which takes place in the mid-1600s in the British colonies. Hawthorne conceived his 1850 portrayal of Puritan life from a distance of approximately 200 years. In turn, Lillian Gish--whose "Puritan art," as film analyst Edward Wagenknecht called it, made her a brilliant casting choice--here removes us one step further from 17th-century Boston. "Hawthorne's Hester Prynne exists in Hawthorne's pages. Why should Lillian Gish seek to create her over again?" asks Wagenknecht. In answer, Gish does not rehash Hawthorne's Hester but creates her own. Chacona, in turn, borrows Gish's Hester, literally lifting her off the screen, once again immortalizing Hawthorne's character. Through his choice of materials, the artist draws upon the history of the idealized female, carved in marble in ancient times and exposed onto film in the modern era. Yet the artist misses obvious color references: Hawthorne uses red as a symbol for uninhibited passion, and black, or iron, as a metaphor for the structure and constraints of civilization. Had Chacona made better use of this referential palette, his work might have been further empowered. The primarily black and white images touched with blue are, however, excellent as they stand. In some of the pieces, Gish can be easily identified by viewers who are familiar with the film; in others she seems anonymous. The viewer's task is to decode how Chacona appropriates Gish's interpretation of Hawthorne. These works contain a history of the creative assessment of a previous artist's output, a step-by-step removal from and embellishment of the primary, fictive experience. Whereas Hawthorne creates a noble Hester who braved social condemnation and became stronger for it, Chacona offers a grittier side, focusing more on the joy, pain and disappointment of commitments of the heart. His art has a surface texture and an enduring physicality that are unattainable in film and a more immediate visual seductiveness than Hawthorne's printed words can convey. This reference to created and recreated reality is even more apparent in Chacona's cibachromes, also on view, for which he used images from both The Scarlet Letter and the film Ecstasy. The obviousness of the screen as the source of imagery strengthens their reference to the absorbing, potentially manipulative quality of the cinematic experience. The lives of the actresses and the actors seem, at least temporarily, to become our own, just as the private lives of the President and his mistress have become our business. If Hester Prynne lived in the present, it's doubtful she could keep her secret even if she wanted to.
originally published September 30, 1998
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