Continuing through April 4, 2026
In 1961 the TV show “The Twilight Zone” presented “Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” depicting the struggles of a clown, a hobo, a military officer, a bagpipe player, and a ballet dancer to escape the blank metal cylinder in which they have mysteriously awoken. With its title unambiguously referring to Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” Rod Serling’s screenplay brought existentialist angst and the Heideggerian concept of Geworfenheit (thrownness) without preciousness or pretention to a mainstream American audience. The discarded dolls, as they turned out to be, had been tossed into a holiday charity bin where they awaited new owners. This trope has engendered popular-media progeny too numerous to mention. Think “The Matrix,” “The Truman Show,” and “Being John Malkovich” for starters. These are stories that question human independence (are we captains of our souls, or paranoid conspiracists?) and examine our unthinking submission to omnipotent higher powers and authority.
The tiny and mysterious figures in Gina Pearlin’s “The Travelers” paintings place us relatively Brobdingnagian-sized viewers in a similar quandary. Pearlin’s forty-year career has centered on her interest in dreams and hypnotherapy. Her work before the Covid-19 pandemic mixed photographs with physical objects, creating “assembled still-lifes,” disquieting, ambiguous juxtapositions of the real and the represented, with small framed photographic portraits inserted into and emerging from painted landscapes.
After the enforced isolation of the quarantine’s “personal, collective, and planetary time of transition,” Pearlin, having been fascinated for a decade with the idea of miniature worlds, and especially with the tiny figures and buildings available to scale model railroaders, took over. She built tiny dioramas, photographed them using altered lighting and perspective, and then painted them on small panels the size of drugstore-printed photographs. Looking at these diminutive, intimate paintings, we feel as if we are peering uninvited through a peephole into some private drama.
The artist explores themes of travel and discovery are explored with a subtlety and modesty befitting the hobby-store origins of the people and buildings depicted. Pearlin favors the anonymous or generic, so the figures she depicts going about their mundane rounds look generically mid-century and middle-class. Stately pedestrian statues are displayed within the orthogonal pathways of buildings and sidewalks and duplicated by their reflections in puddles and coastal waters. Long shadows indicating late afternoon take on a life of their own, as in Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes, violating the normally obedient nature of shadows. The walls enclosing Pearlin’s figures are painted loosely enough to register as cloudy skies onto which shadows are mysteriously projected. Think of Edward Hopper’s psychologically self-absorbed subjects. Pearlin is also interested in the isolated figures in space rather than connected by narrative. Her people wander through a town of apartment blocks, both traditional and modernist in style. They bear with a slow assault by encroaching rain and snow: it’s a new normal, to which we contemporary Lilliputians are forced to constantly adapt.
Because Pearlin’s figures are inexpressive stock figures designed primarily to lend scale and human interest to model railroad kits, the artist is able to create mystery and drama by combining and arranging trees, bushes, and buildings in her stage-like dioramas. The figures are also faceless, so Pearlin sometimes arranges them with their backs turned toward the viewer, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, so that we identify with the anonymous observer. In “Travelers,” the series’ eponymous painting, six figures, all seen from behind and above, walk toward a yellowish wall, painted so as to suggest a cloudy sky. Their gray shadows slanting before them in the raking golden late-afternoon light. But a curious thing happens: the shadows cast on the rear wall turn darker, and they are discontinuous with the floorboard shadows, suggesting an unseen, subtly menacing gap between floor and wall.
Architecture assumes a central role in several paintings. Presented in full elevation, with perspective foreshortening or the distracting electrical wires of signage, they feel more like stage-set props than real-life buildings. In ”After Rain” and “Cold Light,” the chunky modernist apartment blocks resemble cells into which the tiny pedestrians on the narrow sidewalks have momentarily escaped. In “Yellow Sky” and “Approaching the Edge” the pavement, receding in perspective, leads to another of Pearlin’s opaque cloud walls, set above reflective ink-black lakes. “Bosch Building” is an apartment bedecked by commercial signage. Esso logos on the chimneys? An UHU glue-stick crafting shop? A Bosch carburetor store? Here the artist displays her humorous side, as do her three “On the Rooftop” paintings of 1930s-style clotheslines set atop parapeted roofs, their inverted unmentionables gaily flapping in the breeze.
Perfectly balanced between absurdist humor and ecological dread, the officer worker in “Island” dutifully labors at her desk to the end as flood waters rise. “Shadow,” with its top-coated, hat-wearing commuter perched atop a snow-covered ice floe, confronts the shadowy doppelgänger that has finally caught up with its maker.
