Artists worlds apart share common theme

As artists, Michael Gregory and Asya Reznikov inhabit two different worlds.

Gregory, a Californian, is an old-fashioned landscape painter.

Reznikov, a first-generation Russian immigrant who lives in New York, works in the more contemporary medium of video art, which she sometimes combines with three-dimensional objects to create "video sculptures."

If you spend time perusing their back-to-back solo exhibitions at Wake Forest University's Hanes Gallery, though, you will see that both artists deal with place-related themes. And in both cases the work alludes to displacement.

Gregory's paintings of farm outbuildings that are surrounded by vast grain fields are about as traditional as paintings come in the 21st century.

They immediately bring to mind the American heartland and its agrarian tradition.

Close inspection reveals that most of these buildings are weathered and apparently deteriorating, and none of them are houses. There are no visible signs that anyone has worked around these buildings or used them for a long time. They seem to be abandoned.

The latter impression is dramatically underscored by Gregory's treatment of the skies in these paintings. His night skies are crystal-clear, deep blue and speckled with glittering stars, while his daytime skies are dense with portentous-looking storm clouds. The monochromatic color schemes of the daytime scenes heighten the drama, like panoramic location shots in a movie.

Gregory doesn't base these scenes on actual places. They're archetypes of Americana, and in such talented hands can be vividly conjured without reference to original sources.

In addition to his six paintings of rural-farm buildings, Gregory is also represented by two intimately scaled, realistic paintings, each depicting a single tulip against a glossy black background. They recall Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white photographs of individual tulips.

Reznikov employs neutral, placeless settings in the brief video-centered pieces in her show "Along the Way." In these undistinguished environments, she filmed herself performing variations on simple actions such as packing and unpacking suitcases or carrying them from one place to another. These actions have special significance related to her status as a Russian Jew whose family fled Leningrad in 1979, when she was 5, and relocated to a suburb of Boston.

In her video diptych "Circadian Rhythm," she repeatedly enters and leaves an otherwise empty room with an open suitcase on the floor, each time either placing an article of clothing or related possession into a suitcase or removing it from the suitcase to take it away.

Throughout most of the piece, one screen shows her undoing what she does on the opposite screen. The piece ends on both screens with her zipping up the suitcase and carrying it away.

The same nondescript room might be the setting for the video in Reznikov's "Matroshka," named after the sets of traditional Russian folk-art dolls that are hollow and made in graduated sizes so one fits into another. The largest one contains all the dolls. This "video sculpture" shows her opening a suitcase to find a smaller suitcase inside, then opening the smaller one to find an even smaller one inside, etc., until she has lined up seven suitcases. Then she repacks them, one inside the other, until we see only the largest suitcase on the screen.

This pattern of performing an action or series of actions then reversing the performance is reminiscent of Greek mythology's Sisyphus, condemned to spend eternity rolling a stone to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down.

Reznikov gives the pattern another intriguing spin in "Dream," a video displayed in an ornately gilt-framed lightbox. Here she appears to sleep with her head on a suitcase at the bottom of a steep flight of stone stairs. After a few seconds a duplicate image of her, presumably representing her "dream self," stands up from the sleeping version and climbs the stairs, dragging a dream version of the suitcase by its extended handle. Eventually, the dream self returns with luggage in tow, descending the stairs to reunite with her sleeping form.

There are several other video pieces, and photographs from two series.

In the large-format color prints from Reznikov's "Relocating Home" series, she has photographed her hand holding scale models of Leningrad buildings in the foregrounds of actual buildings in Berlin and New York. And, on a different thematic note, her "Date of Birth" series consists of informal, black-and-white facial portraits with bar codes superimposed over them. Derived from the birthdates of the individuals on whose faces they appear, these bar codes suggest prison-cell bars.