BRATTLEBORO
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a UFO?

No, it's a Wigdor, a "wiggle" in time, a charmingly bizarre occurrence on canvas, a myopic journey into the world of the "un-self conscious," a tour-de-force in creative genius.

Dana Wigdor creates the unexpected: celestial "beings" or "events" which float like hovercraft over ice-lit landscapes. Her paintings are close encounters of the painted kind - a twilight zone between the unconscious machinations of her mind and the highly technical doodles of her flying toy-like "beings."

Usually people respond to Wigdor's work by asking if the images in her paintings are UFOs. She finds the response amusing: "They are unidentified flying objects, but I'm not a UFO enthusiast - people seem to find their own stories. I'm not spoon-feeding imagery. It's something you haven't seen before."

Jules Verne's Time Machine comes to mind or Renaissance sketches of Michelangelo's machines. The objects in the paintings are so unique that they offer the opportunity to play with one's unconscious associations with known objects.

Wigdor's paintings are well-crafted in tone and structure. The juxtaposition of heavenly components of mechanical "beings" with the multiple mirrored effect of painted backdrop staging creates a brazenly complex effect. Using only three colors, the artist presents refractions of painted light breaking over cool, wintry landscapes as atmospheric stagings for tiny mechanical "beings" created from her unconscious.

The effect is subtly theatrical as these "beings" hover like alien hang gliders over the cold and prismed land.

Wigdor explained that she reduced her palette to eliminate the distraction of choosing colors and to concentrate on achieving more detail in her "beings": "I wanted a certain luminosity, light quality. It's easier to address the scale of light and dark in your painting, if there's only one or two colors; it's a working tool. I do winter landscapes. The monochromatic blue does give a nostalgic, romantic quality to a landscape, like a black-and-white photograph gives a sense of timelessness."

Wigdor's work bridges the living and images of an un-living mechanistic world.

She explains: I am trying to depict these invented, floating creatures as alive, sentient creatures. Placing them in a landscape that is the least alive – the winter is a dead time of the surface of the world. In this dead winter place, the floating "beings" can be comparatively the most living thing. The other way I am trying to breathe sentience into these invented "beings" is by painting what is real and natural in an unrealistic way – painting what is unreal and artificial in a real way. The landscape is out of focus, the 'being' is in focus."

It is the process of creativity that intrigues Wigdor, how the artist's subject matter arises "straight from the unconscious." She says creativity is "the absence of self-consciousness."

To achieve that unselfconscious, creative place in herself, she uses two techniques. In a relaxed state of mind, she doodles images from her unconscious. Later she blocks out all but the most compelling of the images with an overlay of paint. The composition becomes a distillation of intense imagined mechanism. The overlying landscape becomes a staging devise, merely a backdrop to the theatrical display of the flying machine "beings." The occluded under-painting hints at a three-dimensional universe that is both real and unreal in its executed clarity.

In the creation process, Wigdor bridges her own mental world and her sense of emotional well-being. She says it "provides me a valuable integration between the mental and the emotional - between unselfconsciousness and self-critique. Through painting, I reconcile these two parts of myself. I hope to produce work that is both technical, cerebral - and gutsy and emotional."

A desk-top publisher based in Brattleboro, Wigdor formerly worked in the World Trade Center. When asked if 9/11 had an impact on her paintings, she recalled that she had created her unidentified flying objects before that fatal event. However, she says, she was "very impacted by that. There's a loneliness, sad quality to my work - a sad inflexion - the descent of this floating thing after a bombing. (9/11) changed how I felt about (painting). It had a sadder, lonelier feel."

Wigdor has always created her own world. After high school, she went straight to art school. She recalls her mother saying to her: "I think you were always disappointed in the world, I think you wanted to just invent your own." She was the day-dreaming kid in her class, "floating out the window," she recalls.

Wigdor's works are doodles of a world of magical, mechanical toys flying in the sky. The paintings are a bridge between the cerebral, structured world of the adult and the fantasy of childhood musings. It is the artist's way of "floating out the window" and into another world of flying machines, "beings" which have effortless abilities to travel at will through the warp of time and space.

Dana Wigdor has been invited as a guest artist by Petria Mitchell to display more recent work at Windham Art Gallery's "Shared Inspiration" show this month. These diptychs are bridges between winter and spring, the panels soaring from cold blue facets of light to soft, emergent green. The new-found "beings" of one diptych titled "Fugue" are even more dramatic when compared with her work at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center.

The technological spirit of her mechanical "beings" have coalesced into true life forms. Like a shaman shape-shifting her lively machines to pure anima, the artist breaks a thin membrane between her aerodynamic machine "beings" into palpable amphibians.

These beings have vibrating wings and bejeweled torsos. Like some new and exotic species, their bulbous eyes and patterned bodies speak of tropical rainforests. The cooler spirit of the artist's winged UFOs now emerges into a wild world capable of supporting this new life form of flying frog.

Windham Art Gallery, 69 Main St., is run cooperatively by member artists from the tri-state region. Information: (802) 257-1881. Gallery hours: Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.; and Friday and Saturday, noon to 7:30 p.m.

Wigdor's work can also be viewed at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, 10 Vernon St. as part of the show "Spirited Women: Ten Vermont Artists," running through Dec. 30. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays and Thanksgiving Day. Information: (802) 257-0124; www.brattleboromuseum.org . Wigdor will present a slide show and discussion of her artistic process along with sculptor, Sue Rees, at BMAC, on Nov. 20, at 7:30 p.m.

Diana Lischer-Goodband is a local poet, and regular columnist for the Brattleboro Reformer. She can be reached at dlischer@sover.net .