'Now You See Me' Art Show Startles at the Bundy Modern 

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• Alice Dodge
• Installation view with "The Birds" by Carl D'Alvia and works by Nikko Sedgwick

The Bundy Modern in Waitsfield is both unexpected and totally at home in its landscape. You could drive by the gallery a hundred times without knowing it's there; when you turn off Route 100 and ascend the steep dirt driveway into the woods, the last thing you expect is a glass-and-brick modernist cube rising above a reflecting pool, sculptures dotting an expansive lawn. It's completely out of place but, once you see it, exactly right.

Likewise, the works in its current exhibition, "Now You See Me," are startlingly big, energetic and elegant. The show combines small-to-colossal paintings by Suzy Spence, large photo-transfer mixed-media canvases by Nikko Sedgwick and bronze sculptures by Carl D'Alvia.

Interspersed with the works of art are three pristine-looking motorcycles: a 1974 Ducati 750 Sport, a 1979 Ducati 900SS and a 1975 Laverda 3C, all owned by Wendell and June Anderson, who not only run the Bundy Modern but also live there. They purchased the midcentury building in 2014, recognizing it as an architectural gem. It wasn't their original intent to host art shows, but sometimes form is really insistent about function. The couple have since become integral to the art community in the Mad River Valley, making strong connections with artists and curators throughout Vermont.

One of those artists is Spence. When the Andersons visited her Barre studio, they saw her monumental "Widow" paintings ("Widow XII" and "Widow XIII"), each depicting a woman's head on 12 by 10 feet of unstretched canvas, and knew they wanted to present them at the Bundy Modern.

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• Alice Dodge
• Installation view with "Widow VII" and "Widow VIII" by Suzy Spence

"We've aimed for stuff that not everyone can show: Suzy Spence's heads are a prime example," Wendell said. They are so big that they're mounted directly to the top rail of the picture-hanging system and gently rest on the floor.

The Widows immediately set the tone for the whole show: cool, fast, self-possessed. The Widows do not seem overly broken up about their implied late husbands. Their expressions convey power and intent. In their black top hats — a men's fashion adopted by 19th-century women for horseback riding — they look as though they're about to hop on one of the Ducatis and take off.

Indeed, Spence's 80-by-70-inch "Dirty Racer (Mud)," in the gallery's entrance, shows a female rider on horseback reflected in the racer's goggles. The yellow-and-orange Ducati 750 Sport faces her. It is as though she sees a horse where the viewer sees a motorcycle. Spence wanted to include the motorcycles in the show, according to Wendell. "The bikes represent speed and danger," she told him, "as my paintings do."

In all three portraits, Spence's confident, bold brushwork adds dynamic drama, bringing in drips, splashes, washes and thick lines. She lets the paint do its thing while maintaining control, taking risks and knowing exactly when to stop.

Spence's paintings draw on actual riding subculture as well as use its trappings metaphorically. Her pictures are highly contemporary, but some of her subjects look like they're stepping out of the 18th century (not unlike this summer's Olympic dressage). In works such as "The Bride," narratives unfold: Jockeys in contemporary riding gear entertain an alluring widow character. Another rider seems to be on the run, presumably from her wedding to a male racer on foot. Meanwhile, their dogs look on in a powder-pink-and-blue landscape. It's like Thomas Gainsborough with lesbian overtones.

Across the room, Sedgwick's portraits echo Spence's but use time very differently. The Brooklyn artist's process starts with old photographs, many of family and friends. Sedgwick first destroys the images using acid, then rephotographs the distorted results and transfers them to canvas. He works on the image using acrylic, pencil, wrapping paper and a lot of glitter. These primarily large works (four to five feet on each side) are arresting on two fronts: the personal, sentimental aura of the photos and the bright, shiny, vigorously composed paintings.

The viewer sees the moment the photo was taken but doesn't know when it was. The artist's actions feel immediate and present in stray pencil scribbles or in wrapping paper torn away to reveal a photo. The effect is psychological, peeling back layers of time and revisiting memory.

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• Courtesy
• "Washing the Cat (gold)" by Nikko Sedgwick

This is especially apparent in the "Wedding Cake" series, which uses the same photograph of a Black couple cutting their wedding cake. Their cake topper, a little white couple (the only one available at the time), is still visible in the distorted image. The paintings each evoke different moods, from swirling and dreamy to angular and dark. In "Wedding Cake IV," stripes radiate from a point on the bride's chest. It's a multiverse of different takes on the same moment.

With such human-centered offerings from two of the show's artists, D'Alvia's animal-based sculptures should seem out of place, but they tie everything together. Also based in Brooklyn, the artist contributed two of his works: "Calf," a 17-by-33-by-15-inch sculpture on a low pedestal, and "The Birds," a collection of five 18-inch-tall bronze forms on a higher pedestal in the center of the gallery.

The calf seems like a newborn, due to not just its small size but also its vulnerable pose: lying down as though next to its mother, its head tilted a little. The dark brown surface is covered in highly textured hair, as though it were wet. There are no eyes, mouth or other features, no distinction or space between legs, neck or other parts. Picture an outline filled in as a single mass.

This formal exploration also drives "The Birds." The creatures have no beaks, eyes or distinguishing features. Four are covered in a detailed texture of feathers, while the middle creature is instead polished to a smooth, high gloss, a visual interruption. It's a shorter, fatter nod to Constantin Brancusi's "Bird in Space." These do not look like birds but are also unmistakably birdy.

D'Alvia's strong sense of form relates the show back to the building and makes the viewer consider the motorcycles as sculpture. Looking at them in the gallery, they're both personal and wild, fitting for a display titled "Now You See Me."