The News & Observer
What's Up WUP38

Max Halperen Correspondent  

Published: July 19, 2002

     In the Upfront Gallery at Artspace, Andrea Gomez of Raleigh has mounted a personal, highly idiosyncratic and moving response to 9/11. Crowded with surreal images and flakes of paint, the 11 mixed-media works on paper are all quite small but seem ready to explode out of their black mats.

     Gomez insists that, rather than enlarge the pieces, she'd like, if anything, to miniaturize them further to suggest movement "through a black hole."

The central experience of the group, called "A Mourner's Journal for the New Century," is a fantasia of fear in an airplane trip made shortly after the fatal day. Thus, in the third painting, Gomez has committed herself to the flight and, according to the title, walks "through the detector's threshold and on to the other side." Beyond the portal that is surrounded by flame, all is dark, though we glimpse figures and guard dogs patrolling the area; the region in front of the detector is white, but moving toward the gate of no return is a figure containing a figure (or the shadow of one), as though Gomez fears that she might be construed as having something to hide.

     Once in the plane, according to the fourth image, "We found our seats and shot glances ... at one another." A bearded man in a seat clutches the seat in front of him. An ungainly figure, apparently without shirt or blouse and its head turned backward, slouches down the aisle. No one appears "respectable."

     The work turns increasingly surreal. Thus, in a later piece we are told that a black-clad stewardess "read the lesson, and everybody prayed." Gomez has crowded the air outside the plane with outlined figures, suggesting, of course, the men and women who died at the World Trade Center. At long last, after fantasies dwelling on the terrorists, the explosions, and the falling victims, a figure, surrounded by dark swirls, slouches toward the light: "We walk through the tunnel and back to our lives."

What: "A Mourner's Journal for the New Century," by Andrea Gomez.

When: Through July 27. Open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.