11 show evokes mixed emotions

11 show evokes mixed emotions

The artist Robin Masi provides a place for remembrance at the Fitchburg Art Museum with her installation "The Witness Project." As art, "The Witness Project," with a sound component by composer Ken Field (of the ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic), is only half successful. Even so, Masi gives her viewers an opportunity to reflect on what happened in New York, and in their own lives, on Sept. 11, 2001, and that in itself may be worth the price of admission.

Masi has recreated the site around ground zero as she saw it on her first visit there in January 2002. She covers the walls of the gallery with strong, giant charcoal drawings of the buildings that ring the site the silent witnesses to the attack and to the outpouring of epic labor and generosity that followed. There's St. Paul's Chapel, the oldest public building in continuous use in Manhattan, which suffered only shattered glass. There are the Verizon and Federal buildings. Then there's the

Deutsche Bank Building, shrouded in a black tarp, its irreparable damage a symbol of Americans' grief. Only here does color appear, in the brilliant red, white, and blue of the flag that hangs at the top of the building. Field's soundtrack interlaces the voices of New Yorkers who saw the devastation with mournful saxophone music from two of his CDs, "Pictures of Motion" and "Subterranea." The testaments are brief and evocative. "Every time something happened," one woman says, "people would scream." Field overlays this track of music and voices with a haunting piece he wrote specifically for "The Witness Project," with bells and a stuttering, soft percussion. There's no real melody, but each chime followed by silence is like a presence followed by absence.

If Masi had simply mounted the drawings in a room that showed them in more theatrical lighting and left the viewer in relative darkness, soaking in the music, "The Witness Project" could function as a memorial chapel. These elements alone would have made a powerful installation. Unfortunately, Masi didn't stop there. She romanticizes grief and loss by filling the gallery with costumes made from recycled evening dresses, tuxedo jackets, and a priest's vestments.

Workers at ground zero recovered 144 wedding rings. Masi takes 144 rings she calls them wedding rings, but they're really plastic charms that don't have the heft or size of the most delicate wedding band and places them in a spiral on the floor in the center of the gallery. Two wedding gowns hover over it, one brown, one black, each collaged with photos of the destruction. Formal gloves, like severed hands, spill down the stairs outside the gallery.

Masi collages all the costumes with text and pictures about the attack and its aftermath. By creating ghostly figures with her costumes, she fashions both mourner and mourned. She seems to be trying to tie the mythic sense of loss to the personal. Yet this charred, empty wedding party comes across as gaudy and macabre; it recalls Miss Havisham of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." She wore her wedding dress for decades after being abandoned at the altar. Unable to move on, she lived a desiccated, isolated life.

Choosing to capture the fairytale moment of a wedding, Masi excludes from the picture those who lost parents, children, brothers, sisters, and friends in the attack. She even does a disservice to the lost and grieving spouses, who probably miss the daytoday ordinariness of life with a loved one more than the perfect wedding moment of Prince Charming and his beautiful princess which was already a memory on Sept. 11. She may effectively portray the ashes of the dreams of anyone who lost a betrothed in the attack but that doesn't make for an effective memorial. It's just plain cruel.

A separate costume installation, outside the gallery, does work. Here, Masi has set a bowl of her weddingring charms beside a white gown, and invites viewers to pin a charm to the train. Make a wish, look to the future, believe in the power of time to heal. The maternity evening dress contrasts with the dark ones inside; it represents purity and hope. It's an apt ending for "The Witness Project," a nod toward the possibility of renewal.

Jarring and overreaching as the other costumes are, they prevent the viewer from having a truly contemplative experience at "The Witness Project." But the drawings of the buildings stark, imposing, and mute and Field's wonderful, respectful layering of music and sound, do their work well.