On the evening of the day I  saw “100 Butterflies,” I came home and read a selection from Chuangtzu, the Taoist philosopher: “Once I dreamt that I was a butterfly, fluttering here and there; in all ways a butterfly. I enjoyed my freedom as a butterfly, not knowing that I was not. Suddenly I awoke and I was surprised to be myself again. Now, how can I tell whether I was a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or whether I am a butterfly who dreams that she is a man? This is called the interfusion of things.”

Sally Chandler’s paintings of butterflies — displayed at St. John’s gallery as an installation of 100, in five clusters of 25 each —operate as a sort of private pictorial gallery: the spirit expressed in the delicacy and shimmer of the insect. 

She began painting butterflies about a year ago. Yet the butterflies are not, as one might imagine, perfect biological specimens. On the contrary, it helps to think of the paintings as pages in a journal, as she has titled part of the collection. In their impressionistic quality is as if the artist sketched the rough outlines quickly, then lingered over coloration that refers directly to the way the butterfly functions in our consciousness: A perceptive experience more than a hard body solid. 

To peruse Chandler’s butterflies instils a prolonged musing, a meditation. I reflected to myself that in New Mexico, some of us walk around looking at the ground, remarking the natural world in minutiae. The manifold quantity of earth — the ten thousand things — is rendered more concrete, more actual, in the profusion of ants under rocks, or horned toad lizards, or blunted stones and shells, existing in counterpoise to the vast and mute mountains at the horizon. How easily, though, our teeming ecosystems are bulldozed by the “viéwscapers” and marketeers of the Santa Fe lifestyle. The Taoist name for the “interfusion of things” is also oneness or non being. We infer that Chandler is garbing herself in the dazzling armature of the butterfly, which manifests a new skin each time we see it. Asked in an interview, “What made you decide to paint butterflies?,” she replied, “I see the butterfly as an icon of transformation.”

What more can be said? That you might, for instance, approach “Butterfly 36,” to see the border that Chandler has pencilled around it, like a window frame. I felt this was covert, but intentional: a wish to grow the thing in size in order to fit her field of vision. Or you might notice, in “Butterfly 38,” the density of the blue, as if the hard sky pumped up the creature's colour a full order of magnitude. Chandler has borrowed the mode of artistic repetition (presenting the 100 butterflies as a single work of art) without being ironic or cynical. The fact that her butterflies can be interpreted as environmental statements may not  be incidental to their symphonic appearance here, yet nor is that the major artery of the work. In responding to her interviewer she said her butterflies might be considered sentimental or trite. In fact, the larger issue may be plain aesthetics — the pursuit of beauty that “crowds me ‘til I die” (to quote Emily Dickinson).

Chandler, one comes to see, is on a quest with this art. What is expressed across the narrow pages is her process. On the morning of writing this review, I was reading letters to an advice column of a travel magazine. “I’ve acquired a vintage steamer trunk,” one woman wrote. “Now where can I find the old hotel stickers I want to decorate it with?” I imagine that it’s this phenomenon — the mass marketability of desire, the panoramic lens that it obliterates.