By Arnold Wengrow
Feb. 6, 2004 7:01 p.m.

ASHEVILLE - Marie-Terrel Gallery pairs two artists working in very different mediums for a stimulating study in correspondences and contrasts.

The current featured exhibition in the small downtown venue devoted to art of the human figure is titled "Works on Paper," and brings together Lynne Marshall's drawings and John Kiersten's photographs. The artists focus on a common subject - dancers - with uncommon individuality.

Marshall works in charcoal, conte crayon and pastel. Kiersten creates gelatin silver and platinum-palladium prints. In both techniques, you are aware of the artists' hands at work as well as their eyes.

Unknown to each other before gallery owners Janiece and Terry Meek coupled their work, Marshall and Kiersten also share a black-and-white palette and a love for velvety tonalities on creamy paper.

By observing the differences between their work, you can sharpen your awareness of their distinctive accomplishments, which is perhaps what the Meeks intended. The show is an example of the creative contribution curators can make to an exhibition.

Marshall captures her dancers at work in the studio in rehearsal clothes. She strips away backgrounds and places her figures foursquare and close-up on large paper often 3 feet on one side. Kiersten's images are never larger than the 8-by-10 or 8-by-20-inch format of his cameras. He poses his dancers nude or in floating garments in wilderness landscapes.

Marshall's dancers give an illusion of lifesize. Strong contrasts between dark and light endow them with a sculptural monumentality. Even at rest, they project muscle moving against gravity. Kiersten's figures, on the other hand, are tiny presences against cathedrals of trees, clouds, rocks and water.

Kiersten's pictures produce a nice paradox between the small scale of the physical image and the vastness of the landscape depicted. He forces you to go close, to enter the environment psychologically and find the figure.

Marshall, by contrast, lets her dancers dominate. They emerge forcefully from a white space hanging on a white wall, almost joining you in the gallery. The Meeks subtly lead you in a little spatial dance of your own, stepping close to Kiersten's images, stepping back from Marshal's.

Besides their artistic similarities, Marshall and Kiersten also share a personal affinity for expansive mountain vistas. Originally from Johannesburg, South Africa, Marshall has a studio in Deep Gap, near Boone. Kiersten lives in New York's Hudson River Valley.

In a telephone interview, Kiersten said his landscape photography took an unexpected turn a few years ago when he saw a group of modern dancers performing in a converted warehouse in his hometown of Florida, N.Y. "I couldn't believe how beautiful it was," he said. He realized the emotional response he finds in landscape could be heightened by the power of a figure moving in it.

When he scouts a locale he likes, he has the dancer "move very slowly and meditatively," he said, "until we find the gesture that evokes the quality of reverence for nature."

Marshall also speaks reverentially of nature. Living in Iowa in 1998, she made a visit to North Carolina and "fell in love with the nurturing value of the trees," she said. On the drive back, she realized "halfway to Indiana," that she was "going the wrong way."

"We came back in three weeks and found land," she said.

Like Kiersten, Marshall finds the meditative in dance as compelling as the movement. She notes that she often depicts dancers in stillness.

"A large part of our lives is not just in action," she said, "it's in silence. There's a very big percentage of life that is full of potential, but is waiting."

Arnold Wengrow is an Asheville-based arts writer and a contributing editor of Theatre Design and Technology magazine.