Over the Genie GS-2632 Scissor Lift and a sign – “Instillation in Progress” – the colors of the sea caught my eye. Eight wooden shelves, pale and quiet, holding blue Mason jars. Blue isn’t the right word, but I have searched the Internet; they don’t have the names I need. Sherwin-Williams, BEHR – their paint names and colors are inventive, but not right. I can find pictures of similar jars, but the color is not quite, and they are called just “blue.”
There are maybe 31 jars to a shelf, maybe 33. I keep losing count. Maybe this is because of the varying shades – island sea, northern sea, gray day sea – or because of the video projected onto the jars. It keeps shifting, and my eye gets distracted and my thoughts scatter. I decide to let the number go – let it be 31 or 33 or in between. I watch the video instead.
It is hard to make out over the blues, but I think it is this: fall leaves, then a woman’s eye, then fall leaves and the junk everyone has in their yard, then two eyes. The camera rocks back and forth above the leaves, or debris; I think of the swing set in my grandparents’ backyard, where I sometimes swing on fall days, thinking of grayer things than I did when I sat there as a child. The eye is in the center of the screen, blinking slowly, looking around, but never at me.
I don’t know its name; I can only see it through the frame of the scissor lift, 20 feet away. It is Rebecca Campbell’s, part of a series called “The Potato Eaters,” but when I try to find it online, I can find only its fellow paintings. There is only one other person by it, and he isn’t looking at it. He is kneeling by a small wall in the gallery, whistling, drilling something resting on the ground. From my quick glance around the corner, he's cute. If this were an indie romance, he would come around the corner, his whistling would stop, and he would perhaps tell me I couldn’t be there. I would adjust my bag on my shoulder, say something earnest about the piece, and after a charmingly awkward conversation, the film would cut to us in a dive bar.
This is not an indie romance. This is me peeping over a sign and through a scissor lift to spy on the sea and the fall. These jars without label are uniform yet distinct, different shades of blue, random and precise, empty but full of shifting images and a woman looking around but never out. As I walk away, I wish I could find the right words for these blues.
