Visiting Zeta Eliza Woolley in Massillon
by Aeppel; LVR

It was about to rain. Jeff Charbonneau and Eliza French’s “Massillon” displaced the city from Ohio into the Robert Berman gallery of the Bergamot Station. With slumberous photographs laying agape on white walls, metallic in texture, uncolored, hues of Victorian triumph of glass and iron welded into somber American landscapes. The narrative between photographs murmurs with each tap of a woman’s heeled step, as every sound becomes a resonance of the experience between spectator and photograph. Each photograph is a page, and therefore a voyeuristic transporter into the dreams of a woman with black hair and worn dress, faceless (because it is cold, I presume).

There exists a unity of presence. The muffled sky and white-blue ocean are either creeping sorrowfully against the distance or, in their absence, the spectator might as well have an ocean for a mouth and a sky for hair. The second presence (the I) is belittled, an expansive opium dream, perhaps, of the woman who stares away from us, into the photograph, into herself, a sense of alienation or mystery which is inviting to children. Yes, the photographs are imminently lonesome, desperately tied only to one another in a narrative that unfolds through different characters; the cold black haired woman, a man with the paper face, and a long haired blonde woman. The essential materials, those of unity, are rope, grass, metal, and wheels, all of which transmute into other objects but hold within them a similar character.

The rope which ties the black haired woman’s feet to a chair is loosened, becoming a string game or the invisible stitches on floating women’s garments, or the choking string web which entangles her once again in a rectangular frame, a door. And in her freedom, lying on the grass, the rope has become hair, and it is long and blonde and fed to her by a spinning wheel. And once she is fed, she becomes the blonde woman against a roaring ocean, and the wheels turn into clocks which are either stopped or ticking, or becoming a circle of irons (hours) which enclose the two women, sound asleep against black or against white, parallel dimensions, dreaming of the vast and frost landscapes where sorrows and science seem to meet.

Bones and hair and feet and thread and wheels and beds and books and tiny houses and rocks and skies and a child, a babe which is missing. Oh, to remember and interpret.

The final portrait reveals the black haired woman’s face for the first time, in strength, a bell in her extended hand, gazing towards the exit door. A bell to wake the spectators from their slumber, to chant within them as they leave, the memories of dreams which dissolve slowly until they are but the subconscious presences, the ghosts of air, the flickering rain as it wets the top of their head. Oh, we should have brought an umbrella today!

“”Massillon is the true story of ancestor Zeta Eliza Woolley, transposed through the surreal imaginings of the artists into a fairy-tale of suffering and unpredictable beauty. Each photograph is part of an unraveling narrative, derived from the memories and dreams inspired by Woolley’s life and death in Massillon, Ohio in the late 1800’s.”

Bergamot Station, Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica CA ::: Oct 4 - Nov 4 2008

Aeppel; LVR is an emerging writer and poet from Santa Monica, CA. She is an editor for the growing Ministry of Obscure Knowledge website and a self-published spoken word poet. Her "words (are) marked by a youthful spirituality of sci-fi antiquity."