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Saturday, September 15, 2001

By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic

An exceptional exhibition that hasn't received as much audience as it should because of its out-of-the-way location has acquired eerie relevance in the last five days.

	"And If---," an element of the installation "Ashfall" by the artist Barsamian; mixed medium, site specific. Three priests are represented; brass thumbs on the shelf next to the portraits represents the severed thumbs regularly cut off murdered priests. The exhibition is at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in East Liberty through the end of the month.

"Ashfall -- A Sacred Space," an installation by Dallas artist Barsamian, is at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary through the end of the month. It was conceived to address an act of genocide against the Armenian people in 1915. But this week the experience of vulnerability in the face of salacious barbarism became immediate and American.

The finest artistic expression draws from the universality of humanity and speaks across time to inspire, challenge, mediate, give identity, comfort and heal.

Here, the story of the Armenian plight is told in an informative, illustrated gallery brochure. But the visitor has to seek this information, and without it is free to interpret the contemplative space more broadly. While it's evident that the images are derived from a specific culture and time period, the low-lit interior and worn bench also evoke a house of worship or place for meditation.

The approach to this quietude is threatened by glaring, life-sized cutouts of wolves, perhaps a symbol of the oppressors of the artist's ancestors. They stand in rough piles of rags dyed pink and maroon, a reference to bloodshed but softened, perhaps to signify the sacrifice of innocents.

Passing this, the visitor goes through a primitive bower formed of tree branches and enters a humble wooden home, given an ethnic flavor by an Armenian rug and a hanging brass lamp. The sounds of the country -- music and talking -- quietly fill the space via a soundscape created for the installation by Euriah Ellion Jr.

Most arresting are five "altars" that each relate a story of the genocide through images drawn from historic photographs that have been transferred to lace. As such, they have a vanishing quality depending upon where they are viewed from, and they suggest the ephemeral yet persistent space of memory. Barsamian says his work explores the "moral significance of commemoration as a political force" -- a notion that gives subliminal potency to this piece, and one that the nation will be considering as ways are sought to mark our own recent losses and heroic acts.

	"Ashfall" remains in the Hicks Memorial Chapel Gallery through Sept. 30. Enter at the side door marked Continuing Education Programs. Hours are 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The seminary is at 616 N. Highland Ave., across from Peabody High School. For information, call 412-362-5610, Ext. 2196.

The references aren't easy to contemplate. Three clergy are represented in "And If ..." because they were "special targets." Brass thumbs on a shelf next to the portraits represent those regularly cut off murdered priests because it is with the thumb that they consecrated offerings and blessed their people. "Ashfall" is a tortured, Delacroix-like scene of shame and sexual degradation, a moment that blends factual and emotional to elucidate the striking consequences of flagrant inhumanity.

The power of symbol is used to enforce the installation's gut, ritualistic quality. Wafer-shaped bronze casts of the crucifixion corrode in glass jars with graded levels of rock salt. Burned charcoal rests in a wooden bowl propped on five parallel sticks. On the walls, otherworldly forms from the 11th century Armenian zoomorphic bird alphabet seem to float gracefully.

Robert Barsamian was born in 1947 into an Armenian community in Whitinsville, Mass., the son and grandson of survivors of the genocide. A successful gallery artist in New York, it was after he moved to Dallas that he "experienced a life epiphany that changed the direction of my creative expression" in the form of a mugging during which he was shot.

"Who I was and what I came from became the driving force. My creative journey took me out of the safe work of painting images on canvases" and into a world of dialogue that has its own, if less fiscally compensatory, rewards.

Barsamian tells of encounters visitors have had with earlier, similar works of his that have aided a process of healing. While he didn't realize it at the time, he's constructed a timely place of solitude and reflection for us in Southwestern Pennsylvania to seek consolation in.