Participating artists: Jamie Chiarello, Emmanuelle Gauthier, Liz Insogna, Michael Norkin, Jeremy Olson, Leemour Pelli, Deborah Pohl, Grace Roselli, Michael Schall, Conrad Vogel

Twilight Time is an exploration of the ambiguity of human endeavor. It features the work of ten artists whose imagery presents a range of signification alternating between the iconic and the narrative, applied sometimes with humor or menace, but always with a sensitivity to the innate humanity of the subject. For instance, in Estrangement from Nature by Jamie Chiarello, a woman stands beneath a tall tree wearing a hat made of earth while an unknown collaborator sprinkles water on it to grow flowers, a fitting metaphor for human self-involvement from which emerges a beauty at one with the powers of nature, even as the woman remains stolidly unaware of her transformation. In the collage Deepest Blue 2 by Emmanuelle Gauthier, we are presented with a palimpsest of images of empire, between the inside of a church and the exterior of a castle. The drawings Our Desire by Liz Insogna depicts a fantastic and eerily beguiling communication of lust in which mysterious eyes spy the two from either corner. Do they seem intimacy, fleeing from the world, or does their desire create the world around them? Thrall by Michael Norkin also presents a world pieces together by images of desire, each seen to interact with one another, though their textual sources are different. Unfurled and other drawings by Jerermy Olson presents us with people whose bodies are being attacked, or whose unconscious are actively manifesting, amoebic masses which resemble nothing so much as ghosts or viruses. In two untitled paintings by Leemour Pelli, liminally depicted protagonists encounter forms which resemble bodily organs, sources of illumination, or portals to another plane of existence (or all three at once). Three watercolors by Deborah Pohl present Arcadian landscapes in which disembodied persons identified only by coyly flashing eyes, resembling those of cartoon figures from an idle childhood, cute and malevolent at the same time. Study for War Paint by Grace Roselli is a portrait of an Arab woman who holds her hand in front of her marked face, the image of her rising above a modern city. She is marked by fate, yet she hides her identity, whether for shame or because she prizes her anonymity, we do not know. “Resource Switchboard” by Michael Schall makes the land itself into a entity, connected to a mysterious system of feeds as if drawing power from it, or giving it sustenance. The pop-up and print on view by Conrad Vogel presents morally charged scenes equally influenced by history, literature, and the follies of mankind that are only resolved in muted self-destruction that is aptly bathetic. This exhibition suits its season as well as its theme: a time of transition—when we are first made conscious of the workings of the night world and are given a momentary yet fleeting glimpse which reveals that the same rules apply in either sphere. Uncertainty is not the proprietary tenor of the night; it merely hides the horrors of natural law from the light of human reason and moral justification. Perhaps we are living in a dark age. But I prefer a more transitive analogy: that we are living in perpetual twilight, as we always have, partially in reason and partially in doubt. Each of us may act as agents of change, and as arbiters of succession.