“Tunnel Vision’’ peers out the windshield from the passenger seat into the tunnel ahead. The panel’s swooping shape is wide on the right, sharp and more pointed on the left, accelerating the speed already conveyed with the blur of an SUV passing.
Cole has cunningly crafted a rearview mirror painting that juts from the panel. In it, she re-creates Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole’s “Romantic Landscape With Ruined Tower.’’ It denotes where she has come from. Now she’s in a time chute, a tunnel lined with white lights, red stripes, and a black ceiling. Where she’s going - that light up ahead - we don’t know.
The bottom edge of “Tunnel Vision’’ arcs over what would be the dashboard; to the left, little bubbling cuts indicate the driver’s fingers on the wheel. Cole insinuates the figure here, and takes it all the way in “The Discussion.’’ The painting depicts a nighttime scene outside the driver’s window. Spare, swift strokes of red, white, and silver suggest a car passing. Lights reflect on the glass. I got drawn into all these details and didn’t notice until I stepped back that the panel’s edge describes the driver’s profile. It’s a daring figure-ground inversion.
She goes even further with two ambitious paintings in the Laconia lobby, which provide a bridge to the Zevitas show, depicting walls along city streets. “Dusk’’ comprises multiple shaped panels; the negative spaces in between carve out white silhouettes of people alongside an astute realist depiction of graffiti (painted not with spray paint, but with oil paint flicked off a stiff brush) on a blue-shadowed brick wall.
