Curatorial Essay by Dr. James Mann,
Curator at Large, Las Vegas Art Museum

Austine Wood Comarow: Polage
Las Vegas Art Museum
January 8 to March 13, 2005

A UNIQUE, REVOLUTIONARY NEW ART

There can be little doubt that Austine Wood Comarow's "kinetic light paintings" have revolutionary importance. To begin with, they are unique in the world. No other artist has attempted figural work of recognizable imagery that bears the remotest technical similitude to the appearance and achievement of these pictures. Made visually possible by scientist Edwin Land's development of light-polarizing, synthetic filters seven decades ago, many of these works are indeed "moving pictures," which as physical objects themselves, however, undergo no change or motion displacement. The medium employed in such works is collaged and overlaid, clear cellulose film.

The light-polarizing filter through which the works are either back-lighted or frontally viewed, moves, and the "Polages," as this artist calls her compositions, can metamorphose from one picture into a wholly different one. In her works' perception by the viewer, their imagery briefly shares the "moving" quality of cinema or video animation, but her pictures have a self-contained circularity, from a quickly cycling, repeating sequence, which motion pictures do not. They are, without exaggeration, something quite wholly new in the history of visual art.

They exploit physical principles (understood via science), through creative, esthetic innovation, to constitute a truly new artistic medium, indeed a new kind of art. The beauty of the fully polarized pictures themselves alone is a profound achievement. Their colors and compositions, based on the artist's original, drawn designs, would distinguish them as paintings if rendered in oil or acrylic. But this judgment is immediately inadequate, because most of the works have no single picture or composition. In general, they may perhaps best be seen as two fundamentally different pictures, constituting an entire optical and/or thematic dichotomy, which together serve, in a sense, as two opposite visual poles.

Yet in the ongoing dynamic of the light-polarizing, perceptual act or process, often one work is literally an involved sequence of changing, progressing pictures as well. At either pole, there is a deliberate condition of optimum stasis, or stillness, but these poles exist with innumerable, unstable or incomplete stages occurring between the two. Sometimes the compositions of the two poles are formally the same, yet of opposing color schemes. In these works there is a flow of color through the forms during the polarizing metamorphosis, as if the picture is being progressively suffused or flooded by a boundless, infinitely variable chromatic spectrum flashing and/or sweeping across the picture.

Austine Wood Comarow's innovation is indeed so original and unprecedented that, although the artist consciously exploits all the same historical and expressive resources as does the art of painting, no existing standard of artistic judgment really suffices to evaluate adequately the results of this new art. Viewers of all levels of sophistication respond with utter surprise, simply watching the magic of this artist's pictures unfold as they shift into, out of, and through themselves, with their composed imagery divulging its astonishing, painterly secrets. By spectacularly capitalizing upon a single, specific scientific insight, she has harnessed, controlled, and manipulated her own self-invented medium into esthetically captivating visual phenomena, into artistically multivalent scenes that elicit genuine wonder.

Furthermore, viewers of varying experience levels may all find themselves compelled to look at these works with longer and closer attention than they are accustomed to devoting to single, concrete works of visual art. Thus these remarkable works challenge the viewer's own perceptive capacity, and with the viewer's applied diligence, may extend one's effective range of observation, analysis, and artistic evaluation.

POLAGE: KINETIC LIGHT PAINTINGS

POLAGE, verbally coined from the words "polarize" and "collage," is a unique concept and creation for visual art, originated and practiced solely by the Las Vegas artist Austine Wood Comarow, whose Polage works are the subject of this exhibition. She executes a Polage by first drawing a design pattern that recalls mosaic or stained glass, but with far richer detail, and with much more subtle and thorough gradations of color and shading. She then uses this pattern to cut out and position the clear, colorless cellophane pieces that she arranges by collage method to compose and create a picture. The artist does this while working over a light table covered with a polarized filter, at the same time wearing polarizing sunglasses, to gauge the final, full-color look of the artwork. She achieves her effects by sandwiching varied thicknesses of clear cellophane between transparent, synthetically manufactured, polarizing filters. The filters selectively absorb or reveal the light rays of multitudinous different colors, producing an effect for the viewer of looking at the picture as though instantly switching on the full-range light, hues, and tones of a newly created world. By precisely determining the thickness of the single and/or multiple, overlaid layers of cellophane which she collages together, this artist controls the colors of light rays that are ultimately revealed by means of the polarized filter. Thus are composed her color-flooded pictures, the colors still invisible in the pictures' unpolarized, primary state. Yet within that almost blank, albeit intricately composed, primary state lies embedded the potential to release a breathtaking range of color, that will unfold or burst forth. This sensational unveiling occurs once the color spectrum is unlocked by the action of the polarized filter, whether the filter is employed mechanically behind the Polage, or by the action of the viewer standing before it. In other words, the artist composes her brilliantly chromatic works by using the filtered rays of light that cause her works to be referred to as kinetic light paintings.

The Las Vegas Art Museum is privileged to exhibit this Las Vegas artist's unique work, believing the museum's visitors will encounter her work for the first time as a true revelation. Hers is an entirely visual art that nevertheless nearly transcends the intellectual sphere of art itself, by achieving a level of response that for many viewers will surely amount to nothing less than complete amazement.