It’s all about light at the Cahoon Museum of American Art’s two indelibly joyful and haunting exhibitions, “Illuminations: The Art of Light” and “Tiffany’s Gardens in Glass.”
As the museum writes, “While light has always been a basic consideration of any artist’s work, only recently has it begun to receive attention as a standalone medium. ‘Illuminations’ explores the diverse ways artists use luminous materials to create beauty and spark conversation.” In two of the upstairs rooms housing “Illuminations,” two artists relate to what they call their queer life through art. Caleb Cole invites us into the welcoming anonymity and secrecy of public gay life with two small appropriately garish neon signs, a vintage purple door with scratched mirror with a chain holding a wooden comb attached, a framed inkjet on wood ground paper with phrases from underground LGBTQ newspapers on it, a video with audio headphones of gay people dancing together, and photographs. While next door, Truro visual and performance artist Justine Crosby, uses gouache, collaged papier mache, paper she makes and collects from vintage publications, paint, markers and other mixed media to create lampshades from small to giant with eyes, women’s butterflies, faces, peonies, whales, calligraphy on them in abstract illustrations illuminated by a comforting glow. She places the shades on reconstituted/found lamp bases. In one floor lamp with a Victorian style mahogany base — “Shades of Ghey” (a play on shades of grey between black and white, and gay — and the idea of “throwing shade”)— a boudoirish coral light suffuses a shade with handmade fringe, like something for Blanche DuBois.
In the next room, Dawn McKenzie has created charming shadowboxes between imagination and biography of layered LED-lit “architectural landscapes” depicting the lives of Black families who rented, and then bought, houses in Osterville in the 1960s and 1970s, creating a small, little-known community. Using materials such as scanned images, photos, colored pencil on photo matte paper and plastics, we see in the foreground, lawns and kids, parents and sometimes grandparents — in front of a midground of cozy suburban houses revealing glimpses through windows inside to bedrooms, living rooms with dogs, studies and more, with forest and sky in the background. There’s packing the car trunk for vacation — and vacation cabins, so inviting you want to move in, and folks with fishing gear; there’s the treelined Fortes Street, where children skip rope and throw hoops, even a Good Humor truck. For anyone who loved to play with their dollhouses this section of delightful dioramas beckons with nostalgia.