Images of the frightening, the monstrous, and otherworldly dominate the spiritual imagery of every civilization and probably constitute the source of their raison d'être. If you think of the global history of art, much of its subject matter its based on a range of suppositions that deal with the most profound questions of life; what happens to the `person' after death? Is there an afterlife? Is there any linkage between the world of consciousness and other levels of existence? What is the nature of the relationship between humans and the sources of life and death? These questions seem to be primal in human beings; perhaps a consequence of intelligence. It is possible that the visual arts came into existence in response to this kind of curiosity.

In Lacanian psychology the arena of fear- inducing thoughts produce what Lacan calls "the blot". This is some emotionally fraught issue, thing or event that cannot be looked at or thought about directly. The only way such fearful things can be looked at is through the distorting lens of anamorphism, through the exercise of the indirect look, something that could be thought of as `looking awry'. The substitution of symbol for feeling by means of some iconography that reduces the fear and anxiety of the thinker is the very process that has called both angels and demons into existence. Our fears keep us company, fill the void caused by loss and grief, and give an appearance of answers.

All images of beings from other planes of existence are the consequence of such a process. We control our fears by naming them and giving them a face no matter

special effects. It is very beautiful in a slightly unsettling way.

The viewer is presented with row upon row of spectral, faceless, headless figures swathed in some transparent, gauze-like fabric. The folds of their hoods distinctly define heads. They are draped in such a way as to lead to the presumption that the bodies are like ours. These figures, all life size, each placed equidistant from the next, face the entryway impassively; they do not gesture; they repeat but do not mirror each other, but they are clearly inter-related. Their pose is non-confrontational; they are very clean, very white, somewhere between angel and anonymous nurse. They are genderless, impassive, and inscrutable. The atmosphere is hushed and contemplative; approaching the sacred without giving way to any kind of ecclesiastical cliché such a description can evoke.

As Gay portrays them, these figures are literally blank-faced; they all have been given postures of grave neutrality, this gives them the potential to be frightening, comforting, or quietly present. Jung and Freud, those great dissectors of human wishes, urges and beliefs, have both characterized these sorts of figures as anthropomorphic projections, a way of making the unknowable known and thus embodying, in the only way we can , the unseen and unseeable. "Shadows" symbolizes the attempt to give the great mysteries a "face" of sorts. Gay presents this work with no expectation of any particular association or response; she presents the phenomena but does nothing to guide her viewer further. The work is a reminder of the two great and perennial forms of human imagination; the material and the spiritual.

Dixie Friend Gay, Shadows (installation detail), 2001-2002, fiberglass, gauze, height 66" to height 77".

how terrifying our conception of them. Ghosts and goblins belong to this invented territory, they name what is inexplicable in the dark, the strange noise heard when utter solitude was assumed, the form that passes swiftly from the corner of the eye at the junction between consciousness and its scary lack. Even these states, sleeping and waking, have needed to be named, have had their essential intangibility defined in order to control the fear these states evoke. All differences have to be defined in order to control the terrors of the unknown; the unknowable given attributes that are as inflexible as facts.

Dixie Friend Gay's installation, "Shadows" is seen in a claustrophobic, dimly lit space the gallery refers to as "Shack Obscura". It is in an 800 sq.ft. window-less space adjunctive to the main, traditional Canyon Road gallery building. The gallery has made an on-