Ross-Paul's twins live in a different dimension
By JUDY WAGONFELD
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

They cling together like an amoeba fearing the final cut.

ART REVIEW
 
CONNECTED: LAURA ROSS-PAUL

WHERE: Pacini Lubel Gallery, 207 Second Ave. S.; 206-326-5555, www.pacinilubel.com
WHEN: Through Jan. 29; hours, Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.
ADMISSION: Free

Twins and look-alikes, they mirror each others' expressions and body language. Their clothing defines them as products of our time, young adult males and females dangling between dependence and emancipation.

The pairs crop up repeatedly in "Connected," Laura Ross-Paul's exhibit at Pacini Lubel Gallery. Brooding bare-chested boys stand motionless, glaring out beneath gloomy skies and spectral trees. Drooping, baggy, hip-hugger pants expose undershort bands a last flash of youthful free expression. As if polar opposites, the smiling, vibrant, all-American girls, garbed in tight athletic shorts and tops, pose like Olympic elite preening on a sunny beach.

Though Ross-Paul has visited the entwined twin motif for years, the new waxy surfaces and calligraphic mark-making suggest a turn to supernatural realms. Her double personas reflect and support each other like doppelgangers, the German term for the ghostly, spiritual double of a living person. An apparition considered a sign of death or impending doom, it also represents a repressed subconscious or an alter ego phantom guide. In literature, doppelgangers express duality, particularly of good and evil as in Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Ross-Paul evokes this ghostly world through lush, hazy oil encaustics. Figures float in diaphanous surroundings, bottled up spirits frozen in time, souls preserved in a poignant merging of beauty and pain. It's a portrait Ross-Paul knows well. In her own adolescence, tragically, she lost her mother and sister. Ever since, a lurking sense of death pervades; a doppelganger presence waiting in the wings. As if a force negated by holding still, her conjoint twins hang in psychic limbo.

The boys remain connected through arms. In "Core" they grasp hands overhead, under twin spiritual spheres. In two portraits, one boy's angled arms cleverly and protectively frame both of their heads. In "Arise," they separate physically but not psychically. One levitates off the ground hovering as if a Holy Ghost.

The blond and shapely girls, bound by a single, open-weave hoop skirt, stand in one-legged yoga poses. Balanced against each other, they appear cheerfully secure. But in reality they are one, unable to stand alone -- physically or metaphorically.

The few non-twin paintings of women alone evoke a dark and fragile mood. "Willow," the one piece from a previous show about women exposing themselves to danger, is rife with anxiety. Alternatively, in the recent "Big Blue" self-portrait created after Ross-Paul's successful breast cancer treatment last year, serenity and joy reign.

In the tradition of American Realism, Ross-Paul adeptly chronicles contemporary people. Her unique twist, a mix of the here and now and mystical otherworld, might be termed "Supernatural Realism." Paradoxically, it holds her subjects on the verge of transition but prevents their final leap.
Judy Wagonfeld is a freelance Seattle art writer. She can be contacted at judywagonfeld@msn.com.