Scott Ketcham's "Darkness and Beauty" at the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery

So already, Scott Ketcham's M.F.A. degree show is up!  At the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery at Johnson State College in Johnson, Vermont, Darkness and Beauty runs through February 8. Scott's gallery talk is January 30.  

I am inspired the individual pieces and the totality of Scott's work. And I am thrilled for him, and for all of us who can make it to Johnson State College and have the experience of being immersed in it. The show is magnificent.* Surround-sound for the eyes. Images that allure and repel, and then allure again.  Works that compel moments of uncertainty and recognition, that unsettle and settle us. As Scott's artist statement explains,

Dark images come to me, from me -- a happy man with a comfortable life. Yet these apparitions do not threaten but seduce me, for all darkness radiates mysterious beauty, all loveliness casts melancholy shade.

My work celebrates beauty and darkness, longing and departure. Within a gaze equally primal and decadent, high-minded and voyeuristic, squirmy nakedness and luscious paint join in erotic delight. A magic climax transforms paint into mortal, living flesh. Metamorphosis comes as a surprise.

There's been a kind of birthing here.  The large painting you see in the photo of the gallery above makes no bones about it.  The only painting in the show that has a title, it's called "The Birth of Abraxas." The work on the walls of the gallery both emerges naturally from Scott's earlier figure work (including the figure work he did during the early innings of his M.F.A. program), and steps out and away from it into some new emotional, conceptual place that's been waiting -- even yearning -- to stretch to its full height and width, to flex its unfolding muscle, to assert its heft and substance, to announce and then manifest itself.

Scott's journey recalls for me the response of Betonie, the unorthodox medicine man in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, to Tayo, the novel's central character who fears that he is hardly up to the arduous, high-stakes ceremony ahead of him: "You've been doing something all along.  All this time, and now you are at an important part of the story." It also recalls for me the wondrous, dangerous knife at the center of Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife that can carve doorways into other worlds. Scott may not have cut an opening into another world, but he has definitely managed to slide the blade of his vision into another room, and to follow it there.  No doubt this has been "an important part of [his] story."

I've been watching the evolution and movement sometimes, sometimes hearing "the music from a farther room,"** sometimes not.  When we arrived at the gallery on the morning of January 11, I understood for the first time that a further creative process lay ahead. The final challenge was to transform the empty gallery space so that our eyes, imaginations, minds, and hearts could take in Scott's work and hold it close. "In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you," says John 14:2.***  And so on that Saturday, Scott and Leila Bandar, the gallery's director, combined their energy, vision, and design sense to "prepare a place for you." Together, they made that space into a place, a room, a mansion if not a world.

The gallery is a nearly square room with high ceilings and tall windows on one of its four walls. At night, the windows on the outer wall reflect the contents of the gallery (as you can see in the top photo above); during the day, they admit the blue and gray light of Vermont winter. The three remaining walls host approximately fifty of Scott's paintings, loosely arranged in groups by content and theme.  One set of paintings features birds; another features -- or at least gives the impression of featuring -- couples.  Another set  is distinguished by the non-rectangular shape of each panel's design; I refer to this set of six, which you can see hanging in the middle of the wall shown here, as the "keyhole group" because every painting makes me feel as if I'm peering into a dark, forbidden space. Three sculptural installations and one animation complete and define the space.

Part of what feels alive and exciting about Darkness and Beauty is that it contains works that hadn't been part of Scott's working vision of the show because they did not exist before late December. Right after his teaching semester at Massasoit Community College was over in early December, Scott began to do some sculpting, working with cast plaster and built plaster to explore emergence and divergence, and other passages. He worked without feeling pressured to create something worthy of the gallery show, but he also worked with energy, purpose, and excitement -- and with the hope and possibility that he might create something that could go into the show.  Ultimately, he decided this work had something to contribute to the show, so it journeyed to Vermont, too.

The sculpture you see in the last photo above captures for me Scott's journey, and even his present state as he concludes his M.F.A. program: almost fully emerged, but still struggling toward full realization of his capacities to fly, perhaps even to soar. Who knows what will come next?

* So already, I know I'm Scott's wife and I know I'm biased, but the show is still magnificent.
** From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
*** From the King James Version of the Gospel of John.