Poet Under Glass

Memory troubled Emily Dickinson throughout her life, bubbling up from limbic depths to agitate her surface world. She must have felt its disturbance keenly soon after her mother died, when she wrote, “Memory is a strange Bell – Jubilee, and Knell,” reminding us that, like a mosquito in amber, a single impression can encapsulate both celebration and death.

Glass, not amber, preserves and reveals the stories locked in Stephanie Trenchard’s “Memory is a Strange Bell” exhibit. Her trademark sand-cast glass sculptures, painted, then encased in clear glass, evoke something remembered from a dream. The details are lucid, bright, and three-dimensional, yet distorted and unreachable, separated from us by impenetrable time. Trenchard’s current show peers through this lens at Emily Dickinson’s life – appropriate for a poet who placed the world under a magnifying glass.

Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Jan. 7. Continues through March 13, 2011