In Ellipse of Uncertainty, Lance Olsen notes that the word fantasy “derives from the Latin phantasticus, which in turn derives from the Greek phantastikos, a word that simply – and ambiguously – means that which is presented to the mind, made visible or visionary” (1).  Visionary New England at the deCordova Museum, organized by Sarah Montross, features twelve artists working in visionary oeuvres, unveiling insights into dream allegories and impulses of the eldritch imagination in New England.  With a vast range of mystical lexicons and transcendent ideals, each included artist presents works that act as enticing portals to the so-called unknown.  Below are three selected works. I reached out to my favorite visionary poet, Noelle Kocot, inviting her to collaborate by creating ekphrastic poems in response to Hesper, by Harriet Hosmer; To Learn is to Forget, by Angela Dufresne; and A Color Spectrum with the Rising Sun, by Caleb Charland.  

Harriet Hosmer, “Hesper, The Evening Star,” 1852, Marble.  Collection of Watertown Free Public Library.

Harriet Hosmer’s first original sculpture, “Hesper, The Evening Star,” (1852) is a marble portrait bust that personifies Hesper as a celestial feminine deity, star-crowned and gazing downward, potentially all-seeing or aloof.  Hesper (the Greek word for Venus when perceived as an evening star) mythically transforms with the arrival of pre-dawn, never quite diminishing but steadily shapeshifting and taking on an alternate name with each temporal transmutation.  Through her imagined legendary rhythms, a sense of dualism is projected onto the cosmos.  Endlessly distant and embodying flux and renewal, Hesper becomes an avatar for lesser known nocturnal planetary lore, as she symbolizes liminal states of existing and not quite existing (dreaming and not quite dreaming).  -K.A.

Hesper

The Bible warns against divination, but 
I really couldn't help myself.  The flux and
Strata of morning, a temporary gesture of
Diminishment.  You are the weight of human

Skin, where no one is necessary.  A blot on
The wind's portion, an attenuated frame, is
It craft that makes you seem so distant?  I watched
You come alive with the planets, as I drooled

My way into the next day.  Just beginning now,
I am worried about that girl and wish you could
Protect her.  A steady hand, a wound that is
Drawn there, the limit of what life "contains."

Something difficult remains to be said.  An ambition
Of mice in the field, a star in a January evening.

                                             -Noelle Kocot

Angela Dufresne, “To Learn is to Forget,” 2015, oil on canvas, 4 ½ by 9 feet.  Photo by Suzan Alzner.

Angela Dufresne’s oil painting, “To Learn is to Forget” presents a strange and utopian vision of smiling, jovial beings (maybe human, maybe not) lounging or picnicking alongside animals near a mountain range, evoking an idiosyncratic imagination of communal modes of existence.  With a fantastic and radically open narrative, Dufresne’s painting provokes curiosity while entertaining delightfully speculative notions.  “To Learn is to Forget” carries us to another order of experience or swiftly transports us to another unknown and storied world altogether.  -K.A.

To Learn is to Forget

Tidal Grass Of
The
Star
Ripped
From
An
Alternate
Universe
I
Know
I’ve
Seen
You
Before
And
Now
We
Prepare
To
Perform
Some
Rite
With
The
Sun’s
Burnished
Vehicle
I
Love
You
I
Say
And
I
Show
You
Commingled
Bodies
All
Stretching
High
Above
The
Housetop
And
Don’t
Forget
That
Utopia
Means
No
Place
‘

      -Noelle Kocot 

Caleb Charland, “A Color Spectrum with the Rising Sun,” Bass Harbor, Maine, Color Separation with Three Black and White Paper Negatives, 2019, pigmented ink print, 32 x 40 inches.

Caleb Charland’s pigmented ink print, “A Color Spectrum with the Rising Sun,” portrays sunlight reflected above and across water, as the natural world is recorded and announced as something strange and magical.  A spectrum of light looms marvelously and defiantly, sharply ascending from the Atlantic Ocean, sparking a sense of wonder.  Charland’s works are wizardly created by digitally recombining three color-filtered, black-and-white negatives of long exposure photographs of the rising sun, near the magical setting of Acadia National Park, Maine. -K.A.

A Color Spectrum with the Rising Sun 

There is a monster inside
The light. Carl Jung said that. No, he didn’t.

There is a ghost inside that meditation,
Begging to be let out. Without darkness,

There is no light. Don’t forget it. But
The light shines within the improbable

Mouth. a temporary gesture about
To speak. I love the light. I also love

The soft darkness, crosshatched
Whir and collision. Remember then,

The lamp-lit flame of evening, the colors
Of the spectrum thrown onto windows.

For those who cannot out, I can no more speak for them
Then the handkerchief in a thaumaturgist’s hand.

                                      -Noelle Kocot   

[1] Olsen, Lance.  Ellipse of Uncertainty:  An Introduction to Postmodern Fantasy.  New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. 

Guest contributor Kari Adelaide is an independent curator and her writing has appeared in Hyperallergic, NYLON, Two Coats of Paint, The Huffington Post, the Walker Art Center Blog, BOMB, and elsewhere.

Noelle Kocot is the author of many collections of poetry, including God’s Green Earth (Wave Books, 2020), Phantom Pains of Madness (Wave Books, May 2016), Soul in Space (Wave Books, 2013) and many others.