The World So Far As I Know It

By Mollie Fager, 2-22-06

	Caption: birds eye view of the exhibit "The World so Far as I Know it"

Currently showing at The Dairy Center for the Arts main gallery is an installation exhibit titled, "The World so Far as I Know it" by artist Antoinette (Toni) Rosato. This exhibit is a collaborative work and commentary on life, death, the hereafter and the artist's experience with cancer. This exhibit has become a memorial to the artist as she passed away last night, 2/22, after a long battle with breast and brain cancer. Below is a review and commentary on the exhibit by Karen Ripley, the recently retired director of cultural programming for the city of Boulder and a private art collector...

This afternoon I went to the Dairy to look at Antoinette Rosato’s exhibit “The World So Far As I Know It�, which opened Friday, February 17 and will be up through April 7 at the Dairy Center for the Arts. I walked in the gallery where someone was working on the lights. The exhibit was still in process but it was very quiet and I could hear Toni’s voice, rich like her dark curly hair, speaking the mysterious poem “The Thunder, Perfect Mind� discovered among the Gnostic manuscripts at Nag Hammadi. Toni’s melodic voice came clearly over the speakers.

“I was sent forth from the power,
And I have come to those who reflect upon me,
And I have been found among those who seek after me.
Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,
And you hearers, hear me….�

For me Toni’s voice made everything in the gallery merge into a single statement…life is a question we can only pursue. I listen to her before I look at anything. Then I walk up to the first blackboard. There are five in all. Like spokes in a wheel they seem to come out of the tall, white circular tower with four openings. Inside the tower are photos – small rectangular views of Toni’s cancer and the transformation of her body. There is also a chair with no seat. There is neither rest nor light in the tower.

The blackboards are not so dark. The first blackboard poses a question and gives us lesson # one. “What is a tain? A thin tinplate, the material that makes mirrors reflective. What is mirroring – the material or the reflection?�
On the back of the blackboards are egg like shapes which spell out in braille the messages on the front of the blackboards. Above the blackboards hang broken mirrors. Small black birds are placed among them. Perhaps the eggs belong to the birds. Perhaps they are new life. What is seen in the broken mirrors that are so lovingly constructed? Only fragments. “Does reflection happen first in light or in mind?� asks the first blackboard. And the birds fly on and life flies away.

Toni came to CU as a professor of sculpture in 1989. She hadn’t been in Boulder very long when she came down the hill to the Boulder Center of the Visual Arts and introduced herself to me. From then on we were friends. I loved watching Toni present her art projects to new audiences. She was always thoroughly prepared and quite serious. She made art sound like the normal every day part of life it is. She knew her audience and she spoke straight to them and she was successful.

When I walk through her current exhibition, a collaboration, I think of her other pieces…many also collaborations, each representing a specific moment in time, in Toni’s life, but a moment that is also universal. Most visual artists work alone. Toni, in her work and in her life, is able to reach out and touch us with images we respond to because we recognize them in our own lives. She brings other people into the process, so they, with her, become part of the art. Her vision wraps around the world as she knows it, filled with her family and friends, her students and colleagues. She moves between the personal and the universal with ease.

I went back to the gallery in the late afternoon for the opening of Toni’s exhibit. Even though Toni was not there, there was an air of celebration in the crowd and her voice, now only a murmur because of the noise, was a presence that touches everyone in the room. I could not distinguish the words but I saw more clearly the dancing fragments of light. The cancer is hidden in the tower but Toni’s pursuit of light and reflection, in this exhibit and in much of her work transcends any idea of ending. The first blackboard states “does reflection happen first in light or in mind�. There is no ending because there is transformation and Toni has shown us this, many times over.
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