Gallery Six (part 1)

I’ve been sitting on this for over a year. I got up to a certain part (the end of part 2), and haven’t been able to move it forward. However, I still like what I have, and figured there’s no reason not to have it out where you good folks can see it also. Maybe doing so will help crystalize the rest of it. -M

Monday

A single portrait photograph in the plate glass window stopped Corinne as she was about to cross Mason Street. The shot of a ginger-haired woman was set against a plain white background, and blown up larger than life. Before the light changed, Corinne rushed across the street and turned, instead of continuing down Geary. This first grey afternoon in the big city was for gallery hopping, and she wanted to catch each one she could, and she couldn’t recall visiting or noting one here before. It wasn’t even on the hotel-provided list and map.

Squatting between a car rental agency and a diner, the tan brick one-storey building had no street-facing sign or awning. The glass door, embossed in gold, Nouveau style letters read “Gallery Six”, even though the street number of the building was in the three hundreds.

It must have been too new to be on the info sheets, Corinne concluded, with a little pride of discovery. Heck, most things in San Francisco were still pretty new to her, but finding something that might also new to everyone else made her feel just a little bit more like an explorer, and less of a country mouse.

Standing before the window as it started to mist, Corinne felt lucky to have caught this storefront just off the main gallery drag. It wasn’t the best location for foot traffic; but for the beacon of that portrait it was easily missed. Even though there was no chance of it, the woman in the frame looked familiar, real, like someone Corinne would know at work or passing at the grocery store. The lighting seemed conventional and the curly, somewhat wild-hair wasn’t done up fancy. There was no makeup Corinne could detect; just a rosy blush on cheeks with the visual texture of real skin rather than a model’s airbrushed porcelain. The tops of her bare shoulders just showed in the frame. Looking at it more closely, there didn’t seem to be any reason to find the portrait compelling. Maybe something in the eyes, the way they looked into the camera, or the slight parting of her thin lips.  Maybe because, after the iconic Maplethorpes and Leibovitzes, and everything else she’d been seeing so far, it looked so… normal. Whatever it was, Corinne wanted to see more.

The tinkling of a small bell announced her as she swung the door open, but there seemed to be no staff, nor any other browsers inside. Two walls of the front room of the gallery shared a dozen portraits like the one that had caught her eye, only life-size, not blown up. All were of women, of various ages, colors, sizes; all were posed similarly against a plain background. The photographs were matted on white, and framed in simple black squares. Nevertheless, each one individually, and all together had that same spark of familiarity and reality; and they all looked beautiful – even though few of the pictured women would ever be called clasically ‘pretty’.  On second thought, maybe beautiful wasn’t the word. They looked like real, normal people. No garish colors, or chiseled features or abstract shapes like in some of the other exhibitions on Geary; and no myopic stares like the daily apparition in the mirror.

On the back wall, hung a set of close ups – ‘studies’, maybe? There were shots of single eyes and pairs, mouths closed and partly open, even midriffs – bare and subtly sculpted by studio lights. Those last were the most obviously sensual of the pictures, though some of the parted lips seemed evocative to Corinne. Still, none of the images could be considered to push the boundaries of decency. It was all kind of comfortably artsy, in fact – and the skin looked like human skin, with pores, wrinkles, birthmarks, even a scar or two.

An open archway beckoned her into the next room. Here the theme of faces and parts of faces and tummies continued, but in larger, collage form. One triptych of portraits of a raven-haired woman her own age simply stunned her. The differences from picture to picture were subtle – eyes wider here, mouth shape different there, but the effect was magnetic, and Corinne found herself mentally plotting the vector of each small change from frame to frame.  It reminded her of some of her own lab work, where the subtlest differences in a culture gave her the clues as to what was happening within the colony. Another showed a four-square of different women – a saner take of a Warhol print she’d just seen at the Martin Lawrence Gallery – skin tones ranging between ebony, cinnamon, ruddy red, and nearly ivory white. Each had nearly the same half-lidded expression on her face. These too reminded her in a way of her own work, piecing together the essential similarities and differences of life under the microscope. These weren’t bacteria, however. These were people – real people who probably didn’t spend their lives peering through ‘scopes and taking notes.

Corinne stepped from one image to the next, taking her time to appreciate each. The specialization in women’s portraits struck her as the kind of pretense you could get in these kinds of places. ‘These kinds of places’ She snorted ruefully at the country-mouse attitude it betrayed in her. Large cities were anything but monocultures, she knew. They were more like a nutrient bath in which almost anything could grow. She began to wonder if this photographer did commissions. Could she look normal, like them? If she let her hair loose, and pretended she wasn’t a cloistered geek?

This wasn’t Corinne’s first trip to the annual International Biological Union conference, but the first time she’d gone during San Francisco’s year. She went to the big conferences far less than many of her colleagues; over the last four years, there’d always been one last time-sensitive experiment, then the Proc. Bio paper series, and tenure review. Her department head had practically ordered her to ‘do the circuit’ after shaking the hand of his newest-minted tenured Prof. Most of her contemporaries were already veterans here. All the more reason to get to know the city better, she reasoned, and catch up on a cultural education she’d been neglecting since discovering her passion for biology as a teen.

There was nothing like Union Square or Geary Street in her lovely but parochial Midwestern university town – and she preferred galleries to museums because you could, potentially, if you really wanted, take one of the works you saw with you when you left. Especially here, the galleries boasted actual Warhols and Picassos, and even Rembrandts, and so many others from the classic to the visionary. She didn’t pretend to understand all the nuances of the art world. It just wasn’t her field, after all, but that, the thought, made things easier for her. All she really had to know is what she liked.

There was one more room in the back; clearly she had to see. The final gallery room was laid out differently still. On each of the four walls was centered a large flat-screen display. They were all square, instead of rectangular like a TV – the same dimensions as the portraits in the outer gallery, to be sure. The first display, on the same wall as the door, showed a series of portraits – the same style as those in the front rooms. But these weren’t still photographs – they were videos. They were quite high-definition, like watching photographs move. But Corrine didn’t understand it. The image would show one woman looking straight at the camera for a few moments, then fade into the next, and the next.

The subtle switches captivated her; not computer morphing, but rather expert, cinematic transitioning. Even with different shaped faces, eyes almost exactly matched locations from subject to subject. The same feeling as in the portraits – of a stolen moment of reality – pervaded these clips. She watched at least ten or fifteen changes, trying to figure it out, watching subtly changing expressions, spying several of the faces she’d seen in still form in the outer rooms. Then she shrugged to herself and moved to the next screen.

At first blush, this one seemed the same as the previous; it even showed some of the same faces, though in different order. Yet these images were subtly different. Eyes were different shapes – wider or narrower than the previous set. Mouths were more compressed, or more open. And again after about twenty to thirty seconds, one visage transitioned to the next.

“That series is called “Reception.” A smooth male voice spoke behind her. She jumped, startled, and turned.

A man stood there, dressed in grey slacks and a mild-patterned blazer. He was tall, handsome. Corinne wondered if he was what ‘rakish’ meant. He was a little older than her – mid 30’s maybe. He stood confidently, relaxed.

“I beg your pardon?” she said, mentally scrambling for composure.

“The name of this piece,” he gestured to the screen she’d been looking at, “Reception.” He had a little lilt that spoke of Dublin, or more likely the countryside.

“Oh,” Corinne said, looking between the screen and him. “Um… What kind of Reception? Anything in particular, or is it an abstract-”

“Cum,” he said. He was standing still, one hand in his pocket, the other at ease by his side.

“Come? Where?” she asked, confused.

“Inside.”

“Come inside? But we are inside.” Was there another room in the gallery? Through that door he must have come in on the other wall-

He chuckled, a warm sound, like a tiger, and shook his head.

“Ah, no. A failure of communication on my part. I apologize. You asked ‘What kind of Reception’ The answer is cum. Reception of cum. Each vignette shows the exact moments she is receiving a lover’s cum inside herself.”

Corinne blanched, shocked into speechlessness. What was he saying? She turned to look at the screen again. It had just changed to a young Indian woman with a gold nose stud. As she stared into the recording of the woman’s eyes, they widened just a little bit. The image’s mouth parted and opened just a fraction. The subtle changes revealed by the next seconds were really, now, unmistakable. The next ‘vignette’ was a round-faced black woman probably in her Fifties.

“Oh my God,” she said.

{Continued}