The Gorsline Museum begins its second decade with an exhibition of enigmatic images of individuals presented by two artists whose interpretive approaches overlap while remaining distinct. Neither Gioli or Gorsline was interested in creating conventional portraits each was seeking to give form to intuitively wrought identities. Gorsline sought to project a perceived interior identity onto the physiognomy of his subject whom he observed from different points of view over a period of time. Gioli meanwhile imposed an identity on each person he revealed moving through time by a play of visual signs through which he photographed each one. Each artist used processes of deconstruction and recomposition; each employed techniques of fragmentation, duplication , superimposition and juxtaposition. Seemingly the art of each involved the psychic mechanisms of introspection and projection.

Paoli Gioli, now an internationally known artist was first a painter then became a photographer and more recently a filmmaker. From his vast body of work we have chosen to exhibit a series of photographs created with his revolutionary adaptation of the technique of Foto-Finish originally invented to precisely determine the winner of a sportive event- i.e. a horse race. Gioli has modified- actually he has creatively subverted –the technique to the same degree he has modified the structure of the camera. He removed the shutter of the camera, replacing it with a transparent visual sign which he placed directly in the optical field of the lens, The film is turned by hand (cranked), continuously passing in front of the open shutter. Everything is in movement, the artist, the subject, and the film- its speed and stops controlled by the artist. The result: images of a person whose features have been significantly modified by their interaction with the visual sign inserted in the camera. The person is seen after having passed through this image which has screened it and given it a new identity. The newly imaged identity may be illusory, it is surely paradoxical; no matter what, it has become that which was wished for, if unconsciously, by the artist who chose the inserted visual sign and then the particular sequence he has presented us with in the form of a still photograph.

As for Douglas Gorsline, he painted his subjects in his individually conceived technique of sequential simultaneity which term implied that a sequences of events could be shown as taking place simultaneously while events that occurred simultaneously could be shown as sequences. A sequence of impressions of a person painted on a canvas could represent this person moving in and establishing himself in space in a moment of time or represent the decomposition of a seemingly instantaneous movement.

Each artist in using his unique technique to give being to his subjective view of an objective other produced enigmatic works imbued with humanist psychology.