Husband and wife team Chris Gustin and Nancy Train were featured in Dedee Shattuck’s first exhibition and now return for the gallery’s final exhibition

Dedee Shattuck opened her eponymous gallery in June 2011. The aptly named “inaugural show” featured 36 artists, a virtual dream team of painters, sculptors, ceramicists and more from the South Coast. In the many years since then, new shows have been presented every month from April to mid-December.

The onset of a global pandemic interrupted this rhythm, but as it subsided, exhibitions resumed at regular intervals until Shattuck, ready for her well-deserved retirement, held her final exhibition in August 2022. The bittersweet final “regular” exhibition, titled “Full Circle,” reunited all of the artists from the first exhibition, with the exception of Samina Quraeshi, Marc St. Pierre, and John Havens Thornton, all of whom had passed away in recent years.

The show was great. And that was it. Sort of.

The gallery transformed into something else, a quieter cultural space occasionally used for things like music recitals, poetry readings, yoga classes and the occasional short “pop-up” art exhibition. And it will transform again, as the building becomes the Cedar Wind Center, a place for “conscious exploration and practice” led by Ben Booth. He will offer classes in tai chi, meditation and qigong.

But still, there is one last show. Really, really, really, this time I mean it: ONE LAST SHOW!

“The Fluidity of Perception” features the work of two of the three dozen artists who were part of the opening exhibition: the husband and wife team Chris Gustin and Nancy Train Smith.

Both are ceramicists who draw their inspiration from nature but do not feel beholden to it, as their sensibilities shift to different but complementary areas.

Smith, who has worked as an oil painter and site-specific installation artist, shows two different series of clay sculptures in the exhibition.

The first group includes schools of fish and flocks of birds that any nature lover would envy. But she’s no Cousteau or Audubon. She doesn’t distinguish between shad, trout or bass. They’re all just normal fish. Don’t try to figure out if it’s a goldfinch, a robin or a wren. They’re, in her words, “just birds.”

But they are enchanting. On a pedestal stands a stoneware sculpture from her “Departure Series,” which depicts five dark gray songbirds with a satin finish. They are life-sized, smooth, without eyes or feathers, and look as if they could fly away at any moment.

“Moontide #2” is a wall-mounted soft stoneware circle of dozens of intertwined ivory-colored fish with yellow and pink shades. Their eyes are just small holes poked into the material before firing. It’s easy to imagine it as a wreath hanging on the door of an avid sport fisherman, even adorned with lights.

Smith’s “Rio Celestun” is a 3-foot-tall stoneware work that deviates from the norm of many of her bird works in the rest of the exhibition. These are not songbirds. But there is a pair of long-necked waders that may be herons or cormorants.

Her second series of works continues to be connected to nature, but there has been a shift in approach and sensibility. The more recent works were created after she developed age-related macular degeneration (AMD or ARMD), a disease that can cause blurred vision in the center of the visual field.

Because she can no longer see as clearly as she once could, Smith has had to rethink her artistic approaches. Part of the solution has been to adopt an increasingly tactile sensibility. She told me that she handles the clay in much the same way a child handles a lump of modeling clay: she shapes the balls into ropes or snakes that, when fired, look like sticks, branches, bones or antlers.

She also kneads the clay into shapes reminiscent of leaves, flowers and shells. She then uses the individual pieces to create assemblages that are reminiscent of nests or dioramas of mysterious little worlds.

It should be noted that if Smith had not chosen to discuss her failing eyesight, I would not have suspected there was a problem just by looking at her work. They are still beguiling, and even if the color has diminished even in the newer and more delicate pieces, she makes up for it by fully embracing shadow and light.

Freed from the tyranny of the image, she discovered something new in this quiet space that is a testament to the creative spirit.

Gustin displays two large ceramic sculptures in the foyer of the Shattuck, but it’s not until you enter the main gallery and see the other nine that you realize they actually seem sociable, as if they were chatting at a cocktail party. They charm, they joke, they flirt, they argue, they boast, they gawk, they give in, or they stand firm. But that could be the pareidolia speaking from them.

There is something deeply human about these huge, amorphous earthenware things, even if they don’t seem quite of this world.

Almost all of them are from Gustin’s numbered “Spirit Series”. #2315 is a bright cobalt blue and the obvious eye-catcher among the beige, brown and gray tones. Close behind is #2314, a slightly more muted seafoam green, and of course #2317 is no less impressive in an earthy rust tone.

Aside from the color commentary, it’s the size and shape of Gustin’s figures that draw attention. The more you look, the more you see. And what you see makes it perfectly clear why the show is called “The Fluidity of Perception.”

There is something undeniably human about these limbless beings, something that evokes a wide range of emotions, including the comic, the erotic and the horrific, sometimes all three simultaneously.

Walking around the cream-colored number 2313, one can imagine seeing the double face of Janus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings and endings, who always looks forward and backward and after whom the first month is named.

Others have a comical appearance, such as the character who resembles Fred Flintstone, with the bulbous nose and thick tuft of hair of the cartoon caveman. Others seem to imitate Ren and Stimpy and their ilk.

All of Gustin’s work, consciously or unconsciously, references the human body, and some of it conveys a certain hideousness. Some bumps or lumps suggest parasites, cysts, tumors, things that swell, burst, ooze… the stuff of body horror. Think of the alien baby bump bursting out of John Hurt’s chest, or William Hurt’s biological devolution in The Trip to Hell, or Jeff Goldblum’s transformation into a fly. Read Kafka or Gogol.

But what you see above all in the work is a reinterpretation of the human figure, especially the female one. There seem to be female hips, bellies swollen by children, shapely buttocks, curved shoulders and full breasts, including nipples.

The Venus of Willendorf, a tiny fertility figure from the Paleolithic period, is as large in scale as Titian’s “Venus with an Organist” (1550), Rubens’ “Venus and Adonis” (1635), Renoir’s “Venus Victorious” (1916) and Botero’s “Broadgate Venus” (1989).

There is nothing wrong with a little Venus envy.

Maggie Jackson, author of Uncertain – The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, will host a gallery talk with Gustin and Smith on July 11 from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Dedee Shattuck Gallery, 1 Partner’s Lane, Westport.

“The Fluidity of Perception” remains on view until July 14.

Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles, and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. His writing has appeared in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. You can reach him by email at [email protected]