Eye of Horus has an Alchemy wholly its own

by Valerie Valentine

On a strip of Lyndale Avenue cluttered with miscellaneous independent shops, the Eye of Horus waits like a secret. The space smells of incense and mysterious import items. It’s a bookshop and witchy supply store. If you walk through to the back, a separate gallery upstairs serves as a serene respite from the endless beat of the city. Here you can sit a spell, have a cup of tea, and enjoy the scenery. There’s a wall of windows letting in light and peaceful views of treetops. The current combination of art, poetry, plants and tea makes a great meditative place, if you like that sort of thing.

Wendy Rose displays a mythic series of women-horse figures. The shapes leap, gallop and whinny across the wall. They reside in unreal landscapes, like in “Orchid Canyon.” Here, deep violet shades frame a voluptuous female centaur with long, streaming hair. In one image, a woman merges with a tree, and in another, a luscious rosy nude sprouts angel wings. The result of Rose’s work is a celebration of divine femininity and the artist’s connection to the earth. All the works were a bit distorted by plastic wrapping—though useful in protecting the work, they detract from the viewing.

A big hook of this exhibition uniquely integrates poetry into the art experience. Wendy Rose is not only a painter, but also a poet—her poems are available for reading alongside a comfortable chair. Laurel Winter is primarily a writer, and has samples of her published works on display, along with her paintings.

You can see the progress occurring in Winter’s paintings, which makes sense considering that visual art is her “second” discipline. Rich colors accentuate intriguing titles like “The Ritual Sacrifice of the Winter Tree,” an ominous scene of mystery, and “Self-Portrait as a Cross Section in a Strata,” a psychic-scape of smooth, abstract curve. In a dual composition of painting and poem, “Eve’s Theory of Gravity,” Winter pits biblical Eve and Sir Isaac Newton as polarities—Eve reaches out, an apple poised to fall into the cup of her hand, as one might imagine Newton experiencing the apple’s fall that bore physics to the world. In the poem shown beneath, she queries, “Does knowledge bruise as easily as fruit?” Winter’s talent may reside in an ability to use art as an entry point to creative writing.

Her poetry book, “A Galaxy in a Jar,” is illustrated by Beth Hansen, whose drawings hang beside Winter’s paintings. The combinations create one-of-a-kind harmonics of artistic energy. The illustration based on the chapbook title shows an intricate globe floating in the universe, tangled with separate, snakelike threads, effectively summoning the concept of a microcosm in the vastness, much like Winter’s poems. Hansen’s pen and ink drawing “How to Make Love to a Shark” is funny in title, sexy in female figure, and menacing in masked figure poised over the ecstatic woman, all in realistic detail.

Bead artist Elise Matthesen and poet John Calvin Rezmerski have teamed up in an unlikely manner. Each created an object inspired by the other. The poems are framed by the beadwork; some are intricate necklaces, others are wire sculptures webbed around the frame. This wall display creates an homage to the precision and artistry inherent to both poetics and jewelry-making. Matthesen also sponsors “poetry challenges” for her creations—
poets can write a poem inspired by the jewelry, and take a chance to win the actual items.

If you’re seeking a change of pace in the art scene, the Eye of Horus offers a mixture of café lounge, meditation studio, reading room and gallery, with an alchemy wholly its own.

Poetic Alchemy runs through September 26. Eye of Horus Gallery is located at 2717 Lyndale Ave. S., Mpls. 612-872-1282.