Images from Space and Mind
Published Friday, Dec. 4, 2009
Story appeared in TICKET section, Page TICKET12

David Wetzl's elaborate illustrations of the inner workings of the mind and Galelyn Williams' quirky, poetic assemblages and reworked photographs at JayJay make for a fascinating combination. Both artists make work that is idiosyncratic in the extreme, yet each draws on different aspects of the self in creating their works.

Although his images are complex interior landscapes, Wetzl's work is objective in that it references the psychological theories of Ken Wilber, author of "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution" and looks outward to the realm of science, politics, and philosophy. In its rigorous model-making, using symbolic colors to define varying stages of evolution, it is linear, left-brained and very male.

Williams, on the other hand, works from the subjective, interior, subconscious self to give us otherworldly images that hover between ghostly emanations and alien universes. Her dreamlike visions draw on the dark, feminine, intuitive side of creativity. Williams is Dionysian while Wetzl is Apollonian.

The two differ also in their pedagogical approaches to their audience. Wetzl offers extensive statements providing keys to his symbology. Williams is mute when it comes to explaining or talking about her work.

It's instructive to let Wetzl speak for himself. In a statement accompanying this show, he talks about two important terms: "involution" and "holonic." "Involution," he states, relates to the evolution from the material to the ethereal realm. "Holonic" describes the condition of everything: atomic particles, cellular structures, and words as both a whole and part of a whole. Using an eight-color coded system of successive states of being, Wetzl creates orderly yet intricate images that map the workings of the mind.

While his work is idea-based and therefore conceptual, it has a strong physical presence born of a natural ability to create interesting, if sometimes inscrutable, imagery and a dedication to the highest level of craftsmanship. Transcending modernist dialectics, rather than being a minimalist, he is a maximalist who piles on successively intricate layers of images from platlike grids to neural networks to blobs of concentric colors to all-seeing eyes.

In "It Does Matter That We Evolve Beyond Matter," he gives us a mass of rock-solid matter from which ethereal patterns of networks emanate, rising up to a third eye fixed on a spiritual symbol that takes the form of a lavender octagon.

In "Holonic Ego Builds Up and Moves On," he uses his color-coded system to denote increasingly ethereal levels of consciousness that move, he says, not only through psychic levels but the history of humanity. For all its theoretical intricacy, the thing that stands out about this and other of Wetzl's works is that they look good. He is masterful in his use of color and form to create images unlike anything seen before.

Williams, by comparison, is a primitive. Working intuitively with her materials – found objects and old photographs – she morphs them into moving images that take us to alternate universes.

"Hansel and Gretel" translates the two waifs of fairy lore into 19th century extraterrestrials standing under their rocketship, which is thrusting up in a dark red sky. Despite their humanoid appearance, they come from a different world and a different time.

Similarly "P. Piper" gives us the child-charmer of Hamlin surrounded by rats in an otherworldly landscape. Also drawing on children's stories is "Raggedy Ann, Raggedy Older," in which the rag doll grows up into a ruddy harridan with a bird nesting in her hair.

The photo-based works are complemented by a series of assemblages in which Williams gives us images of a bipolar creature, a stack of boxes and drawers titled "Fox in the Hen House" and "Rain Bird," a birdhouse enclosing a sprinkler and hose nozzles.

Of these, my favorite is "Arms Dealer," a witty assemblage in which a small woman with an animal's head stands in a garden of tiny doll's arms arranged like stalactites and stalagmites growing out of a ghostly cave.

Williams' work is simpler than Wetzl's but no less powerful. It needs no explanation beyond its effect on the imagination and senses.