Paintings & Poems/Poems & Paintings.

Words can have a deadening effect on images, and images can do the same to words. An image can be stopped in its tracks by an interpretation that shuts down the ongoing play it offers, and an image can become a mere illustration to a text, cutting off the imagination’s trajectory.

So the project underway at Artamo, Paintings & Poems/Poems & Paintings, which involves the pairing of images and words, is a tricky one. Fortunately, it has been approached in so many different ways, and draws on such strong material, that it can’t help but succeed.

Consider the series by Janet Bothne: As the artist found images of woods emerging from her painterly experiments, she titled the paintings (“Stopping by Woods to Dance,” “Stopping by Woods to Paint,” “Stopping by Woods to Dream”) in honor of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. If the canvases had been studies in white and grey-or even in any vaguely wintery or monochromatic colors-the effect would have been deadly. But the canvasses are some of the most coloristically variegated and saturated around. They refuse the status of easy accompaniment for a well-known poem, opening up questions about the woods we see depicted, about the poem, about the nature of sight, and of representation.