February 17, 2005

A couple’s love story told through their art

By Lauren Heaton

Paloma Dallas, a Yellow Springs native, and Juan-Sí González, who was born and raised in Cuba, wanted to tell their love story through art to touch on the deep honesty and the risk involved in loving someone.

Their story, which is played out in a new exhibit, “Interface-Interfase,” is not the result of their process of finding each other, but rather it is the process itself, they said.

The show uses hundreds of mixed-media pieces to communicate the experience of meeting someone of a different culture and realizing that to know each other is to be open to telling about the past. The meticulous installation of photos, earth-filled glass jars, mirrors, a giant baby bottle and dozens of historic photos of the Cuban Revolution together express that the painful irony in exploring another’s past is accepting that it can never be fully grasped or understood.

“Interface-Interfase” bares the personal truths of fulfillment as well as disappointment in speaking of the universality of relationships.

The show runs at Antioch’s Herndon Gallery from Feb. 18 through March 29. The couple will give a performance at their opening reception on Friday, Feb. 18, 7–9 p.m., at the Herndon.

Dallas was working as a journalist covering Latin-American issues in New York City when she met González, a photojournalist covering similar stories. They were assigned to a story on the consulate at the Mexican Embassy where, in between Dallas’s questions, González slipped in several of his own. If her interview could be edited, so could his photos, Dallas thought. And so began the breaking down of barriers that distinguished each from the other and the building of a new collaboration binding each to the other.

The gulf between them — she was single and 27, he was a 42-year-old divorced father of two — appeared to be wide. The murky, sometimes beneficial and often corrupt relationship between the U.S. and Cuba underscored the fact that they had essentially functioned as enemies for the last 47 years.

Building a relationship against the backdrop of the political conflict between America and Cuba meant Dallas and González had to be open to a different interpretation of the past, they said. Though González grew up hating Americans, he said, he had to learn not to blame them for their government’s decisions. Dallas had to learn to see Cuba as a country whose socialist victories had prevented so many from being able to earn a living wage and feed their families, she said.

But as it happened, Dallas and González said, they soon realized that they had much more in common than they had expected. González came from a Spanish-speaking liberal country and was using English as a second language. Dallas was from an English-speaking liberal town and was using Spanish as a second language. Both idealized the other’s country while blaming it for some of the problems that existed at home.

Truthfully, though, they said, their relationship grew less out of moral convictions of finding peace between countries and more from the simple truth of love.

In New York, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they found their hearts wanting to feel nothing but outrage and remorse for those whose lives were lost. But at the same time, as they later admitted to themselves, they could not help but celebrate falling in love.

Moving to Yellow Springs two years ago took them from the international and political landscape of New York to a quiet retreat ripe for inner discovery. González taught Spanish literature at Antioch College and Dallas taught Spanish and writing at Wright State and the University of Dayton, while both did freelance work as writers and artists. Here in the peace of the mundane, they said, they saw themselves stripped of their protective coverings to reveal their fears, their jealousies, their regrets and all of the things that love requires one to deal with.

“Interface-Interfase” speaks to both the human and the cultural aspects of being with another person. On the ground floor of the Herndon Gallery are works representing González and Dallas, as individuals: a nude photo of each sitting in a chair on a dirt road where they could have met somewhere in the lush Ohio countryside; wooden boxes full of memories from the past locked from view; an image of González in the nurturing act of nursing Dallas.

On the gallery’s second floor the couple displays a more lofty exhibit of the history of the U.S. and Cuba and how past events have shaped both the current political arena and the citizens of each country.

In trying to know each other so deeply that they become one, the artists acknowledge that it is impossible to get as close to one another as each desires. Yet exposing the truths beyond one’s surface is the only way to find meaning in relationships.

The home that Dallas and González share has been overtaken by the art they have collaborated on for the last three years. Art fills the living room, it covers the dining room, it has seeped into the bedroom and reduced the kitchen to nearly half. They barely have made time to eat and sleep, but, they said, they are happy with the richness they have created by living honestly and communicating openly.

There is no message in their work but the hope that by risking their own vulnerability, others may also risk theirs.