Cast on a Foreign Shore at Gallery4Culture.
Cast on a Foreign Shore at Gallery4Culture. JG

My mother always told me not to go out in the dark, and she still does. "Don't go out as a single female," is the way she says it.

Seattle artist Pat DeCaro made an installation of a girl in the night. It's called Foreign Shores and it's at Gallery4Culture all this month. We talk about immersive art sometimes, referring to art that physically envelops you, or that you interact with. Foreign Shores takes control of your body and mind in a more old-fashioned, less literal way. Like a novelist, DeCaro crafts a keyhole you slip through before you know it.

Pat DeCaro.
Pat DeCaro. JG

Foreign Shores is a charcoal and pastel drawing that covers three walls, made on pieces of blue Fabriano paper that are connected in a continuous grid with barely any space between them, almost floor to ceiling.

Sometimes the imagery overlaps, sometimes scenes repeat, seen from another angle. The landscape is lonely, and it's nighttime. It's a dimly known place, as the title indicates, maybe dreamt.

The moon is out. Fog coats black rocks. There may be a storm coming, or a sunrise. Nobody is around except one girl, wearing the same thing every time she appears at various distances in various locations: a snorkel, goggles, and a bathing suit.

Sometimes she holds an inner tube around her waist and a flashlight that sends out a cone of light. Occasionally and ominously, a cone of light falls on her tiny body, as if someone is following her movements.

Pat DeCaro.
Pat DeCaro. JG

What light there is, from the moon, the flashlight, or a lighthouse, can't illuminate much. The landscape gives shape to the light rather than the other way around.

We never see the girl's face, only see her pondering where to go and where she is, sitting and looking out on the water or standing at the water's edge in scenes that can't help but bring to mind Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 classic romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, or any other number of pictures like it.

Rather than a tortured hero, genius, or lover, DeCaro places a girl in this majestic setting, as if to say, Why did we ever think a girl didn't belong in this charged psychological place, in this grandeur and sublimity?

Is the girl setting out on her journey on or under the water, or has she just arrived and looks back toward the familiarity she's left behind? What DeCaro can do with charcoal and pastel is tremendous—the shading, the modeling, the sharps and the blurries. For her backdrop, she chose a blue paper, which shines through like a sheet of radioactive aquamarine.

After a minute, you realize that looking at Foreign Shores feels like wearing night goggles. The goggles that the girl wears, we gaze through, too. The girl is small and the night is big. I know what that feels like, and maybe you do, too.

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JG