Since the primordial fire circles male and female shamans have been telling metaphorical truths with masks, costumes and sculpture. Puppetry brought animations to story-telling long before moving pictures, television, and other technical marvels. These complex large format tableaux in oil are at once primitive and modern. The mural scale renderings allow viewers to become participants in her performances. The lush and colorful interiors are populated with traditional Javanese and Indonesian Wayang Golek Pole puppets, masks, costumes, and other theatrical tools. Vases of fading flowers, T-squares, Buddhist and Hindu sculpture, knitting baskets, fruits, and vegetables provide another level of ocular and cerebral sustenance.

Kline-Misol’s apparently haphazard arrangements are deceits designed to manifest the surrealism of bedtime stories while making wry commentary on current events. In a world full of shadowy state-sponsored and freelance terrorism, Kline-Misol offers positive counterpoints of beauty that are brimming with allusions to illusion. Like photographs that freeze living action into tiny time segments, Kline-Misol’s intensely detailed motionless vignettes prompt viewers to imagine what transpired before the picture formed and what will happen next. Kline-Misol’s nicely executed stills-of-life paintings are emotion-laden psychological cliffhangers that embrace global mythology, dreams, theatrical fantasy, and art history like old friends.

–Wesley Pulkka, Ph.D., art critic, Albuquerque Journal and other publications