Laconia Gallery is pleased to present Sight Plan, a large survey of paintings by local artist Dana Clancy. One group of oil paintings called Viewing Space (2008/9) initially featured at the Danforth Museum and curated by Rachael Arauz is reconfigured at Laconia. This series shows the interiors of museums populated by the viewing public. The other series Network (2008/9) is a wall sized chain of acrylic portraits based on the profile photos of her “Facebook friends” originally created for an exhibit at the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. The difference in how we view images of people we see online, great artworks in museums or people we look at from a safe distance, remind us of how many ways there are to look. Clancy loads each work with lucid social and cultural observations surrounding these public/private visual interactions. Even as spectators, we are implicated by being part of the chain of friends, by viewing the viewers or by being seduced by the massive interior spaces.

This personal connection to the content reminds us how intimate our relationship with art (and art spaces) can be. This is how Clancy sees things; she is an artist, married to an architect, and they both enjoy visiting museums. They recognize the museum space as a built collaboration between their professional passions. Their intimate knowledge and appreciation of how space and light shape a viewing experience - their experience - is tempered by the restraint and compositional clarity needed for a museum to function as a great stage for art. Dana references the Tate Modern in London, The Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art and Mass MOCA to focus squarely on how these global brands try to attract and impress a broad audience.

In most of the works in Viewing Space, Clancy lets viewers feel the huge interior spaces and dramatic views into other parts of a museum by using a bird’s eye view of tiny museum visitors taking positions in dramatically vertiginous atriums. By shrinking the people and the art to ant sized proportions, the artist shows the art viewing experience being overwhelmed by the spaces, swallowed up in a sea of concrete or precariously perched at a precipice protected only by a thin sheet of glass. Clancy has a deft way of visualizing emotional states, spaces, and importantly, the room and color between them. Clancy negotiates the tension between the function of the space and its inherent beauty or power over the (figures and) contents it was designed to present.

Clancy’s very contemporary approach to painting atmosphere ranges from high chroma areas of flat color to deliciously modulated transitions between cool and warm, dark and light. The detailed involvement of color updates these carefully crafted works with a personal touch that tempers her vibrant cultural critique. The virtuoso painting of the mixed lighting sources and reflections in Spin (2008), for example, are coupled with descriptive gestures of tourists in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. An odd lean, the viewer with hands behind his back dutifully clutching a visitor’s guide, or the tired figure, slumping on a museum bench are too familiar.

Dana Clancy is best known in the Boston area for her unusual portraits in oil or pencil and gouache that combine finely rendered graphic representations of her subjects with abstract shapes of brilliantly colored, matte pigment. In her newest work, Clancy extends her exploration of the voyeuristic gaze to consider the act of looking shaped by museum architecture. The figure remains present in her work, but is now observed from a greater distance, and Clancy's talented juxtapositions of rich, unexpected colors define both real and impossible spatial relationships. Viewing Space premiers a series of paintings that take as their subject dramatic new museum buildings such as the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In these works, Clancy often situates her viewer at the disorienting edge of balconies to foreground the spectacle of looking, and the diminished presence of paintings on the walls suggests the highly constructed nature of viewing art in these galleries. Details such as cameras, maps, and guidebooks in the hands of her figures playfully, yet subtly, allude to the mediated nature of museum-going. The planes of flat color that framed her portrait subjects in earlier work find a new function in these museum compositions as Clancy astutely observes the abstract forms present in the soaring, empty lobbies and atriums of these museums. Viewing Space invites visitors to consider the ways in which the shapes, light, and color around us--as well as the art before us--affect our aesthetic experience.

Once again, Dana Clancy and her paintings are looking at us. In a 2005 show at Boston University's Sherman Gallery, the artist confronted us with portraits of subjects who stared right back from the canvas - some with binoculars. Before that, she painted webcam users who peered at the viewer through the Internet ether. And now, she is aiming to make us self-aware again.

"So many contemporary museums - and this has been written about - are built in such a way that they are not as private. The viewing spaces are much more opened up. At MoMA, I think it's six levels you're looking down where you can see other people," said Clancy. "And the more I look at museums, the more it seems like it's built into our culture, this need to see other people also doing the same things we're doing. This constant looking at others is part of the Zeitgeist, and I'm very interested in that."

But this is no one-liner of a show. To stand before one of Clancy's large oil and acrylic paintings or tiny works in gouache is to be drawn into a complex series of conversations. Clancy contemplates color and form, she plays with perspective, and uses her quiet brushwork to mull over grand architecture that she says functions "almost as an installation artwork itself." Most interesting is the push and pull between the abstract and realism, or form and narrative.

"It's similar to the things I like about Japanese paintings and prints. It's more about presence than a story. It's more a hint or a short story than a novel," said Clancy. "I used to collect photographs at flea markets because I really loved the bits of information in the background that caused me to wonder about the people in them and why they were there. So like that, I'm hinting at a story that's open-ended."

Clancy, who has a studio in Boston, has exhibited in galleries on both coasts and also has work in the permanent collection of the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln. A new initiative brought her work to the Danforth, as the second in a series of shows that will be curated by the region's top emerging freelance curators, and will feature New England's most interesting new talents. In short, the museum's New England Currents series is being handed over to guest curators, and 10 shows per year are planned.

"I was so glad to get an opportunity to present Dana's work. She's a very smart, intelligent painter. She asks questions of painting with great curiosity, and she's not afraid of the history of art," said Arauz. "Like some of Monet and Degas's work, this series is about looking and voyeurism, and the spectacle of daily modern life. . . . Dana has just found another moment and another location for that."

In "The Storm Outside," a solitary woman wearing a red scarf gazes forlornly through the glazed window of the Institute of Contemporary Art. Peering down from an upper level at the Guggenheim Museum, Clancy depicts a score of visitors in "Spin" as indistinguishable from specimens in a Petri dish. In "Actors," visitors approach a large curious installation like pilgrims making offerings to a fickle god.

"Dana uses lush and vibrant colors in a very controlled way. And she makes smart choices at every point," she said. "This exhibit is about looking and seeing within a space. All painting, all art is about seeing." For French, Clancy's paintings engender a "quiet contemplative state." "To me, she creating a kind of solitude that's a very personal expression," she said.

She often places a "division," she said, through her canvases' center "to set up a dynamic play" between the people and space on either side. "The viewer is asked to choose what to look at first, the same way that you do in the museums that I'm painting. Looking at my work from far away, the viewer sees bold colors and strong shapes and is, I hope, drawn closer to the work to examine the figures and important details that are not apparent from far away," said Clancy.

In "Crossing," Clancy depicts three levels of visitors moving through different levels of a museum but never brushing against one another. In her striking "Split Vista," a few barely visible visitors congregate around the fringes of a huge plaza-like area, dwarfed by the vast vacant space. Exploding distinctions between realism and abstraction, she paints gorgeously disorienting scenes of people swallowed by the architecture of modernity, reminiscent of David Risemam's sociological study "The Lonely Crowd." Rather than deliver a direct emotional punch, Clancy's paintings offer more subtle pleasures of nuance, color and composition. Is that enough?

A viewer might reasonably wonder how their experience of observing strangers from a museum's stairwells or balconies leaves them with anything but vertigo. Some viewers more comfortable with representational art might find it difficult to engage these works on an emotional level. Most would acknowledge Clancy's strengths as a graphic artist and nuanced colorist. But like the subjects in these images, they might feel the paintings' formality freezes them out, leaving them bereft from any human drama. Clancy packs so many levels of perception in her canvases that the act of looking becomes fraught with uncertainty. What do I see? What can I know? Can I trust my vision? Her vision?

Mary Cassatt's ''Woman in Black at the Opera" (1879), at the Museum of Fine Arts, shows a woman with opera glasses watching the show; in the distance, a man turns his binoculars on her. Dana Clancy, a deft young painter with an unsettling exhibition at the Sherman Gallery at Boston University, takes a cue from Cassatt. She considers the act of looking.

Stand in one section of the gallery, and you'll find the subject of nearly every painting gazing right at you. The figures peer uncomfortably upward, their faces framed in bright-colored ovals and cut off at the chin. It's a bit like looking through a peephole and glimpsing someone outside your door who is short, but stretching up to gaze right back in at you. These images are wry and disturbing; they burble with character, but the characters appear as if they're both reaching toward you and are completely inaccessible. The artist's technical proficiency makes the scene all the more tense.

In another area, Clancy has covered one wall with a gray, maplike painting; smaller paintings on wood panels depicting spectators hang over it. The spectators look not at us, but off in another direction, as at a parade passing by. It's a relief not to be stared at, but if you look to the left, you'll see a wall full of small paintings of people with binoculars -- who might be focused at you, but they might also be focused at the spectators, and you're somehow just in their line of sight.

Dana Clancy's recent work takes as its subject the act of looking. The process of all painting and drawing inherently implies this activity, yet Clancy's elegant compositions uniquely propose a complex understanding of how we see with our eyes and our memory. Although seemingly unrelated in theme, her enigmatic portraits and her views of tourist walkways together reveal the artist's attention to the experience of observation. Employing a variety of formal strategies throughout her working process, Clancy situates her audience on both sides of the viewing experience-as spectator and spectacle-with images that are full of mystery, wit, and visual intensity.

Clancy's paintings are a skillful and intricate hybrid of drawing from life, photographic sources, and her own memories and imagination. Her portrait process sometimes begins with a staged photograph of her subject, often wearing a hat or affecting an exaggerated facial expression. The camera lens thus offers Clancy an initial source of optical intervention, allowing her to frame, edit, and contain her subjects. Her painted representation of these sitters mediates the instantaneous nature of the camera image with delicately rendered, graphic forms built up over time. The intensely colored shapes of matte pigment that surround her sitters further transform the literal, documentary vision of the photographic source into a painterly, conceptual experience. In Camouflage (2005), the pregnant subject pushes beyond the limits of the pink ovoid form, both echoing and anticipating the emerging fetus within her body. The silhouetted leaf forms that cascade down and across the canvas disrupt the photographic residue of the carefully modeled figure and insist on a representational flatness that locates the subject in a metaphorical realm of memory and emotion.

In Futures (2004) Clancy's assertive female subject recalls the equally self-assured woman with binoculars in Mary Cassatt's 1879 Woman in Black at the Opera that hangs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In Cassatt's composition, a small male figure in the distance turns his opera glasses on Cassatt's subject, both echoing the woman's gesture as well as reinforcing the gendered nature of subjecthood. In contrast, Clancy's woman is alone on the canvas and turns her gaze outward to confront the viewer. The bright, double lenses of her binoculars obscure the viewer's efforts to identify her and intensify the viewer's potentially uneasy sensation of being observed, even scrutinized, with an optical device meant to amplify distant details. The soft grey atmosphere and darker, horizontal passage along the lower edge of the canvas may suggest a nighttime cityscape as the object of her gaze, with bright bits of paint punctuating the foggy ambiance like twinkling lights, yet the disjunctive scale of the woman looming above the horizon redirects her vision out of the composition to face the gallery visitor.

This shift of the viewer between spectator and spectacle is a vital theme in Clancy's work and plays out most dramatically in her installation for this exhibition, in which individuals from a crowd of parade spectators are isolated on a series of small panels that erupt on the surface of a brilliant field of color. Clancy observes each viewer's head from slightly above, which focuses our attention on their visual activity and also heightens our own alertness to the sensation of being watched. Cassatt and her colleagues, such as Manet and Degas, often made the act of observation their subject matter, as well, and like these nineteenth-century painters, Clancy explores the various incarnations of the modern-day flaneur in order to consider how we interact visually with the people and landscape around us.

In her Viewpoint Series Clancy's subject is the landscape, yet once again, she turns her attention to the experience of looking by focusing on the guided gaze of the tourist. In Hot Spot (2004) a ribbon of wooden walkway emerges out of Yellowstone National Park's sulphurous fumes to steer the viewer through the fragile, crusted topography. The ambiguous foreground edge of the canvas, in fact, implies our own presence on the walkway. The deep red paint that defines the handrails guides our eye through the composition, as it simultaneously determines the limits of the tourist's experience. The lone tourist depicted in the image gazes out at Yellowstone's natural wonders, yet Clancy denies that experience to the gallery viewer, directing our attention instead to the controlled nature of looking and being looked at.

Clancy's rich, complicated palette and painterly brushstrokes generate alluring surfaces, and it is easy to enjoy her work purely for its technical mastery. Her blend of graphic modeling, decorative forms, and chromatic range, however, interrogate our status as viewers of the landscape, viewers of people, and viewers of the work of art. Embedding within her paintings both the observer and the observed, Clancy's works insist on our own active participation in the exchange of gazes with the world around us.

Have you ever had the feeling that you were being watched? Have you ever taken the subway and felt someone's eyes looking at you? That feeling of being seen in an uncomfortable and almost invasive way was how I felt seeing Dana Clancy's exhibition, Intimate Distance, at Boston University. The architecture of the GSU Sherman Gallery is the perfect design for this exhibit; as you walk up the stairs you can feel the eyes of her paintings looking at you through the entirely glass walls that face the outside. As you walk in and wonder through the space you are never really quite sure if it is the gaze of the people in the artwork or the people outside that glass that make you feel uneasy.

I first encountered Clancy's work in the exhibit, Face to Face, at the Green Street Gallery in 2003 where she had portraits with compositions that looked like they had been painted by looking through a peep hole, or from snapshots imprinted in your head by catching someone out of the corner of your eye. Clancy's delicate and deliberate painting style creates a space of tension on the canvas. At first glance they are strange and kind of story-like, but the more you look the more you are looked at in a variety of uncomfortable ways.

In this new exhibit Clancy show us that there are many ways of being seen. On one wall are some landscapes, with a deck or a piece of architecture, that have people gathered or the people look as though they are missing from the scene. On another wall there are a series of small works that portray people looking out at the viewer from behind binoculars. If you move out of the way the subjects are staring at the people in the paintings on the wall across form them. While it is not uncommon to view many things in life through binoculars it is still an obstructed way of looking at anything. Binoculars are uncomfortable, you are usually viewing from a distance, and often you are spying on something you aren't meant to see. Being the subject of that gaze is discomforting and I wonder if the artist is intending to make me want to leave her exhibition, because when being stared at, you move until you are no longer in the voyeur's line of site. Moving to another place in this gallery does not relieve the tension of being both the spy and the spied upon. If you are looking at a series on one wall, there are eyes behind you and to both sides of you. In a way Clancy's work is more like an installation in how it changes the psychological space of the gallery.

My favorite piece in this exhibition is an entire wall painted a shade of green-grey with a faint brownish map-like image as the backdrop that connects groups of small paintings. There are several small paintings of people who are grouped together and describing the various lines of site becomes like something out of a comedy routine,

It looked like an illustration of having friends on the Internet, having that uncomfortable space between you and those you seek out and what connects you is simply having the desire to look. This was the moment where I really loved being in the gallery with all of Dana Clancy's different visions of how we look and how we are looked at. The wall piece is to me a diagramed explanation of how we interact every day, intimately with distance, with desire and with discomfort. While we can't stop looking, or stop wanting to turn and see where that feeling of being watched is coming from, we also can't always find words to describe these non-interactions. So we go to Intimate Distance, in the glass gallery and be seen looking at Clancy's exhibition. Here we realize that we don't need to have words, we all have these experiences and we can all share in the wonderful feeling of looking and the enjoy the discomfort of knowing there are eyes always on you in this space.

Dana Clancy specifically set out to portray people at a party, who are either angry or confused. She has a clever device for guiding the viewer into her space: Each portrait rises within a bubble of color. That orients us and gives Clancy an anchor to create occasionally offbeat perspectives. The woman in ''Search Party II'' wears an orange, cone-shaped party hat positioned at the top of her forehead like a rhinoceros's horn. Portrayed within a red bubble, she narrows her eyes and holds her head down, as if readying for the charge. It's smart, funny, and harrowing all at once.