The impossibility of fixed narratives and roles gets some poignant treatment with two intimately scaled Portland shows: “A Game for the Living” at Dunes (through at least July 15, perhaps longer) and “Unmoored: Deconstructing the Narratives of the Self/The Other,” at Moss Galleries in Portland (through July 16).

I’m tempted to suggest that the popular idea implied by the book title “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” is at least somewhat validated, except that “Unmoored,” while presenting a distinctly female point of view, has larger implications for all humanity.

The title “A Game for the Living” is from Patricia Highsmith’s thriller about two male artists facing existential questions. It’s an apt metaphor for the show’s pairing of stoneware sculptures of New York-based Jared Buckhiester with paintings by Minnesota artist Peter Shear.

The two met during a residency and have maintained communication ever since. Both seem to be addressing, among other things, questions of about the ever-shifting definitions of masculinity. Buckhiester delves more consciously into this topic, stating that “My fascination is with the complexity of desire’s origin, and the ways it dictates behavior.” Viewing this topic through a gay lens yields singularly peculiar – yet intriguing – results.

“Untitled (man eating a snake)” arose from a photo series Buckhiester did of truckers snapped from his car as he passed them on the road. We don’t know this until it is explained to us, so the sculpture appears to the innocent eye almost like an unglazed pre-Colombian vessel, only the snake glazed in yellow.

Buckhiester intends it as a urinal these truckers could carry in their semis, offering it as an almost ritual object to express gratitude for their spontaneous, mostly unconscious complicity in the images. From a gay point of view, other associations might also rush in: truck stops as notorious locations for homosexual assignations, how this activity questions truckers’ outright presentation of brawny masculinity, the double entendre meaning of a “man eating a snake,” and so on.

“His Duty he Always Faithfully Did” is a statue of a male form from the waist down shackled to a post that rises between his legs. Again, we ponder its many possible allusions. Does the title refer to someone who “passed” as straight but was actually gay? Is masculine identity a burden that binds men and restricts their freedom to explore? Because the figure is Black, could it have something to do with enslavement of African Americans? Is this subliminally referencing sexual bondage and discipline? We never know, which adds to the mystery of these unusual sculptures, where man and beast often merge and body parts seem impossibly contorted.

Shear is a painter of great grace and quiet beauty. He doesn’t outwardly challenge the meaning of masculinity. But his visual vocabulary – abstract expressionism – arises out of a male-dominated tradition abounding in egoic masculine bombast. Counterintuitively, his work is soft and still, even when his brush is pushing around paint with some degree of assertion. They are also small in scale, which runs counter to the genre’s commonly outsized proportions (consider Pollock, Still, de Kooning, et al.).

A painting like “Casino” is ethereal, almost like the vaporous manifestation of a gas on the surface. “Skeleton” presents what looks like a ghost of a gesture in a pale sky blue field. “Charge” seems oddly titled considering its wispy, cloud-like marks on washed-out gray ground.

Even in works like “So Far” and “Cat,” where strokes feel more stabbed, spiraled, slashed or directional, the overall effect is quite serene. They intimate representation, but, it seems, more as afterthought. I got the sense that Shear didn’t set out to paint a cat in that so-titled work. Rather, it spilled onto the canvas autonomically and, when Shear stepped back, saw in its green and black shapes a feline form. “So Far” evokes a blue waterfall into a pond, or a white sailboat on a churning sea.

IDENTITY AND HOME

“Unmoored” juxtaposes the work of two powerfully expressive women: Iranian-born Samira Abbassy and St. Vincent-born Simonette Quamina, both of whom live and work in New York. It’s curated by Billy Gerard Frank, who last summer showed his 2002 Biennale video “Second Eulogy: Mind the Gap” in this space.

Abbassy’s paintings and sculptures are probing explorations into her psyche, one split at a young age when her family migrated from Iran to Kent, England. This bifurcation is examined in many ways. Her style mixes Eastern and Western art canons, swirling together Indian and Persian miniatures, Qajar court paintings, Christian icons and Chinese painting.

Abbassy’s iconography originates as highly personal, but gradually morphs into more universal themes. For instance, her Ocean Series diptychs began as a way of processing the plight of Syrian refugees, but expanded to include more universal themes of displacement, migration (and its dangers), and the constant internal oscillation between country of residence and culture of birth in the souls of deracinated people. What do we keep of our origins and what do we let go?

Her art is particularly poignant at a time when her culture of origin has ramped up its oppression of women, one of the reasons that propelled them to a foreign land (England initially). Iranian women are burning hijabs and dancing publicly in the streets to protest the fatal beating of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the morality police. Iran regularly censors work of female artists like Shirin Neshat, and laws have forbidden sterilization of women and prevented distribution of contraceptives, as well as offered incentives for girls to marry as early as 13.

But, fundamentally, Abbassy’s work deals with the eternal fluctuations and evolutions of identity, another universal theme. Multiple selves, mirror images suggesting perpetual reassessment of the self, and twin pairs of eyes intimating her enate double cultural and psychic vision abound. Her pictorial language is a layered amalgamation of inspirations. Abbassy has explained her affinity to Dante’s concept of figures being “contorted according to their sin.” But she also draws on Jungian archetypes and Hindu myth and lore – i.e.: halos of women’s heads (ancestral female protectors) are a reference to the goddess Kali.

Quamina also deals with these themes, but through the labor-intensive medium of graphite. She wields her predominantly black-white-gray scale palette with breathtaking subtlety and skill, dramatically enhancing it by obsessively collaging variously parts executed in woodcut and linocut, rubbing and chine-collé into shaped works that usually don’t conform to the expected square or rectangle.

But she also uses it, one intuits, as a way to challenge cliché assumptions of incessantly joyous Caribbean people living amid lush tropical colors. The monochrome denies the stereotypical floral ebullience and brightly painted stucco buildings we associate with the region.

Quamina is an uber-talented draftswoman. The pattern and detail, sense of depth and three-dimensional space, materiality and complex layering she achieves are nothing short of astonishing. We feel her obvious love for her native home, as well as Guyana, where she also lived. Many interior domestic spaces feel drawn from personal memory and feature luxuriant foliage (rendered monochromatically of course) and comforting food.

Yet the subjects’ faces are often obscured in some way, intimating perhaps an invisibility endemic to the immigrant experience or the constant shifting of identity. The collage aspect of Quamina’s work also implies, materially, the composite nature of our identities. In the inscrutably titled “Faster Than Fed-Ex,” the figure seems shut out of her Caribbean world by a curtain of vines. The space she occupies is plainer and sparser than the one beyond this scrim. In the impactful “Round Robin,” a mass of dreads covers her face, and her body feels broken or at least contorted, halfway under a table as if trying to hide or vainly searching for something she’s lost.

The sense of never being able to rest in a single place or state of being, of adhering sustainably with any one idea of ourselves, resonates persistently throughout this show.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

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