Existing comment:
Throughout her work Montgomery has recognized the significance of choice and that the decisions she makes-about color, shape and directionality-as she creates each work represent stand-ins for ideas. In Dialogues she aligned identical forms painted different colors to hint at the infinite array of options and, coincidentally, set up a conversation among them. The cross-shaped paintings she variously titled Intersection pose the idea of crossroads, which in life implies that a decision to take one path, as poet Robert Frost recognized more than one hundred years ago, precludes taking another.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken," 1915 |