Reality and Duality

Tucked inside the swirl of curvy little Summerlin streets, bright and pastel-hued, its just-so lawns not merely manicured but pedicured, is ... a happy mess.

Paintings and sketches, books upon books, strewn about, racked up, spilling out into the garage-turned-studio-annex, cluttered with boxes of stencils and cans of paintbrushes, spray paint, just plain paint-paint.

She and Summerlin. Creative sprawl and ordered suburbia. Quite the contrast.

That outside barking? A German shepherd/Rottweiler mix. Name's Bubbles. Seriously. Its disposition?

"Either lick you to death or bite you on the butt," says the artist.

Duality -- perfect.

"This is about the meeting of two worlds," says Randi Chaplin-Matushevitz, whose exhibit, "Welcome to My Garden," features pieces exploring the duality of couples' relationships, now at the Winchester Cultural Center Gallery.

(Note her last name: Emphasis on the third syllable, and spare her the Passover/Manischewitz jokes unless, she says, she can earn 10 percent of the profits.)

"A lot of my work is about love. It came from my feeling that your life is your garden, and you are either going to be blooming or wilting."

Unpretentious in a way few artists seem to be -- why hide the pre-50 gray hairs? -- she's contentedly hitched, with a honed sense of interpersonal give and take and an eye for marrying her artistry to those ideas:

Keeping the self while maintaining the couple. Understanding dependence while preserving independence.

Balance. Compromise. Coexistence.

And clear-eyed expectations.

"Love is the most misunderstood and biggest fairy tale we have," says Chaplin-Matushevitz who, married at 35 a decade ago, now has a 7-year-old daughter. "What really got me interested in this theme was when my daughter was younger, we went through this Disney fantasy and you see we're taught that guys have to be Prince Charming and girls have to be the princess. What really happens is different."

(For the record -- she and her husband are "pretty solid.")

Often linked by the symbolism of flowers -- representing unification, growth, agreement and nurturing, she says -- her works are visual impressions of psychological concepts.

"His World," a twin-panel combo of acrylics, spray and collage on canvas, pictures a boxer in triumph, surrounded by flowers, but also ... joysticks?

"It's a male in his stereotypical glory, a little macho, his hands up, his idea of being male, so there's joysticks around him," she says.

Yes, you can make that connection in your mind to, well, you know ...

"It's phallic as well, but I don't know any man who wants to give up the joystick or the remote control. It's control issues."

Swapping viewpoints, "In Her Head" follows the female through five separate pieces. "They're the inner thoughts of the female," Chaplin-Matushevitz says of the artwork streaked with the word, "Imagine."

"It's looking at her in time, her head's in different places, being in the moment. It's that space and time in a relationship."

Re-emerging in "Balancing Act," the boxer shares canvas space with the woman's expressive face, as the pair are encircled by a pastiche of flowers and written scrawls of bonding such as "Best Friends" and "Forever and Ever."

"Garden of Love" pictures two tall flowers, at first glance resembling a set of carnivorous plants. "They're in a world of passion, of red and black, they're divided down the center, each trying to hold themselves, each has a seed," she says.

Sprawling across nine panels as acrylic on canvas, "The Courtship" details just that. "We're alone, we come together, they're dancing, then they're almost separate again," she says. "It's this story of who we are at any given time."

Emphasizing patterns in her work -- "life is patterns," she says -- Chaplin-Matushevitz notes the exhibit explores relationships from an ultimately upbeat perspective.

"My work tends to be positive. It's not angry work. I look at a lot of artwork around me and it's destroy, destroy, destroy, and what's left after you dissect it can be very hopeless. It's important for me to uplift, rebuild."

Clarity in her purpose.

Duality in her art.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.