'Breakthrough' brings up-and-coming artists together

What you might not notice at first is the color of the piece, a pink flesh tone, which matches the color of the material that surgeons use to reconstruct nipples. Subtle, perhaps, but deeply affecting.

Goldstone and Duarte, through notable installation pieces, offer some of "Breakthrough's" most rousing images. Goldstone's "Hush" -- which consists of thousands of real leaves, hand stitched into a blanket-like structure that is suspended with wires -- is a luminous, gentle work offering delicate inspiration. The shadows cast on the floor by the hanging work is part of the art. "Hush" twists and turns, almost looking like a serpent, and when you walk under its center, it feels like ducking into the shade of a broad, leafy tree. Created specifically for the site, the leaves on this work will slowly decay, making this an ephemeral moment for this time and place.

And Duarte's work, next to Goldstone's at the other end of the gallery, is a show stopper. Duarte's family moved from Mexico to Corcoran to work in the cotton fields. (At one point his family lived just a block from the museum.) After an arts education at Fresno City College and in San Francisco and Chicago, Duarte moved back to Mexico, where today he is co-founder and director of an experimental art space in Chiapas.

For the show, Duarte recreated a performance art piece he originally made in a small village outside Chiapas that involved the villagers burying him up to the head in a shallow, hand-dug hole in the dirt. For the museum version, Duarte created a 12-by-6 foot slab of "dirt" (made of concrete and soil) that seems to float out from the wall. There's a hole for a person to stand in the middle of that slab.

At the opening reception Thursday, Duarte planned to bring in a local artist, Arturo Villanueva, to "perform" in the work by standing in the hole, proud and immobile. The idea was for Villanueva to serve as sort of a human conduit between the piece and the public. A video shot at the reception will be projected alongside the work, along with a video of the original Mexican setting.

From just a sheer visual standpoint, it's a remarkable image: How can something that big and heavy float out from a wall with no other visible support? But the work is also deeply textured in terms of meanings, particularly economic and political, concerning what he considers an unsustainable American system that relies too heavily on immigrant labor. "I wanted to show the body in resistance against architectural tensions as a reflection to a breaking point that society will have to soon confront," Duarte says.

(Frankly, I can't do justice in this limited space to the scope of Duarte's artistic ambitions in this work, so I'll need to focus on it alone in a future column.)

Again, what sets Goldstone's and Duarte's installations is the artists' clear and powerful artistic voices, just like their other four colleagues.

After viewing the six artists represented, the cynic might ask whether there is an element of local boosterism at work here. To which I'd answer: Absolutely. But that doesn't make it provincial.

Instead, I see it as a celebration of the talent to be found here. And isn't celebrating the local good in our lives what community is all about? "Breakthrough" is a show that takes those six artistic voices and blends them into a powerful song. I know I'm still humming it.

IF YOU GO

"Breakthrough," through April 28, Fresno Art Museum, 2233 N. First St. fresnoartmuseum.org, (559) 441-4221. $5