Sight and Sound Collide in Narrative Art

Following a year of traveling throughout New England, local artist Kate Gridley’s latest exhibition, Passing Through: Portraits of Emerging Adults, has returned to the town that inspired it. With seven portraits on display in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts (MCA) and ten on display in the Jackson Gallery at the Town Hall Theater, Gridley’s exhibit has inspired a number of interdisciplinary events within the community, each focused on the young adult experience.

On Sept. 26, Clark University psychologist Jeffrey Arnett gave a public lecture in Dana Auditorium, looking at the changing experience of the contemporary young adult through a psychological and sociological lens. Afterwards, Gridley led public tours of the gallery exhibit at the MCA. That evening, she was joined by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Dana Yeaton and his Playwriting I students, who were tasked with creating fictional monologues inspired by Gridley’s oil portraits.

In many ways, Gridley’s piece itself stems from a desire to marry distinct disciplines and mediums. While the oil portraits act as the literal face of the exhibition, each painting is accompanied by an audial narrative cut from an interview that can be accessed digitally through the use of QR codes. The piece incorporates perhaps one of the oldest purposes of visual art portraits with more recently developed mediums and seamlessly integrated digital technology.

This interdisciplinary approach is in service of bringing attention to a demographic that Gridley feels is often misrepresented.

“This generation gets a lot of criticism, and I feel it is inappropriate,” Gridley said. “For the most part, this is a very hardworking, passionate, ‘wants to do good in the world,’ very intentional generation. I think it’s one of the most extraordinary, interesting developmental periods.”

Gridley’s attitudes stem from experiences that in many ways parallel what is becoming the norm among our generation.

“When I graduated college, to my surprise, I was given a fellowship to continue to paint,” she said. “My father said to me, ‘You have your twenties to figure out how to make this work, and if by the time you’re thirty this isn’t working, you’re going to have to come up with something else.’ I think that was extraordinary, and he was way ahead of the times.”

Our emerging idea of the current generation in many ways reflects what has been Gridley’s long-held belief for years.

“[Jeffrey Arnett], who spoke at the Emerging Adulthood lecture, loves this group between 18 and 29, and I have to say, I feel the same way,” she said. “I found today - and I’ve never met him or read his work before - that he has quantified all that I have observed.”

Gridley’s piece has been in development for years and could even extend further into the future. Each subject originally sat for a photo shoot, which became the basis for the oil portrait, and were then interviewed for the sound portrait, which synthesized an hour-long interview into a three-to-four minute narrative.

For many of the participants, this process took place years ago, but alterations to the paintings have been added more recently. This is both a reflection of Gridley’s insistence that her subjects feel comfortable with the final result, as well as a desire to reflect changes in the identities of subjects who are still forming and shaping these identities. Gridley confessed that only one of her portraits was actually varnished and complete, while the others remain open to alterations indefinitely.

“After I painted the original portrait of EJ [one of Gridley’s subjects], she came to me and told me about how she began wearing this bracelet that belonged to her great- aunt, and because of what she meant to EJ it became a very big part of her identity,” Gridley said. “And so I put in the bracelet.”

While the decision to alter the paintings is very much tied to the specific theme of Gridley’s work, it was also rooted in classical tenets of portraiture that include symbolism as characteristic of specific subjects.

While she gave her subjects complete freedom to choose what they would wear and how they would present themselves, oftentimes certain articles of clothing or accessories were borne of a desire to communicate a specific idea.

“[For Aubrey], I decided I wanted a specific symbol of Western culture, as he’s originally from Botswana, so we went with sunglasses, and that was very intentional. We built that symbol together,” Gridley said. “Maddy actually made the butterfly ribbon to wear in her hair that day, and that to me represents a piece of her heritage. Now she lives in Vermont, and she wore a lumberjack plaid dress, which I think is incredibly cool.”

For that reason, all of Gridley’s subjects were people with whom she had developed personal relationships prior to initiating the project. This allowed her to have more intimate conversations that enhanced the quality of the sound portraits.

“It was important that everybody I painted have something interesting to say and not be afraid to say it ... it was also important that everyone be distinct from each other, that it wasn’t just a set of cookie cutter models,” she said.

Maddy Sanchez ’17 had her photo shoot and interview years ago while she was still in high school, but she still feels the resulting piece is an accurate portrayal.

“Things have changed, but the general concept is still me,” she said. “I haven’t listened to the sound portrait in a while, but I know I started off by saying I don’t like to be alone and that’s still true.”

Sanchez is the subject of a promotional portrait that has been distributed throughout the New England area, garnering a fame that she did not expect.

“For me, it’s a little strange right now, because it’s being shown at the College and I have friends who are going around saying, ‘Maddy, your face is everywhere!’” she said. “It was more like I gave Kate her material and she went off with it. Even though it’s me, it’s her work.”

Sanchez also appreciated Gridley’s focus on portraying adolescents in a non-traditional, positive light.

“I do think it’s a good idea. [Kate] points out that there are portraits of babies, and portraits of older people, but the image that most people have of kids our age ... tends to be pretty negative,” she said. “I think showing another side is a good idea because we’re not all the same, and she has a good variety of us in there.”

For now, at least, these seventeen subjects are our only window into Gridley’s depiction of emerging adults. Yet Gridley makes it clear that these seventeen subjects are in no way representative of every young person.

“It was more about my experience,” she said. “It just seemed like a reasonable lens since many kids had come through Middlebury for different reasons. I say this is just a slice of seventeen kids who came through this town at this time. That’s really the demographic they are, I can’t say anything bigger, I can’t draw any bigger conclusions.”

The exhibit will run until Oct. 26.