VISUAL ARTS: A moving narrative on life and death

Bottom line: A dramatic multimedia meditation on life, memory and oblivion offers plenty to look at and think about.

The kayaks in Whitespace are seaworthy. Richard Sudden built them according to the plans he and his brother used for their first boat long ago. But one look at the four 14-foot kayak skeletons, lit from within and looming like totems in the darkened gallery, and you know that their function here is metaphorical.

Their vertical position gives them presence as sculpture. It also highlights the hull as a vaginal shape, which Sudden accentuates by the elements he places in their central cavities. The boat is a common symbol for life's journey, and the elements he has chosen for the four kayaks —- a red orb like an ovum, and so on —- create a womb-to-tomb progression.

The boat serves in many world myths as the soul's conveyance from the material to the spiritual world. That symbolism comes to the fore in the next gallery, where two kayak skeletons hover like spirits above a pair of completed kayaks resting on the floor. It is an apt setting "For the Waters of Lethe," a film Sudden made with Jason Vise, which is screened in the gallery.

In Greek mythology, the Lethe is a river that flow through Hades. The dead drank its waters, also called the River of Oblivion, to forget about their lives on earth. Sudden has made up his own myth for the film, a story about Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, and a pair of earthly lovers, whose death she selfishly causes. Repenting, she stops them from drinking from the Lethe and sends them back to the living in the kayaks that are now in the gallery.

Shot in black and white, the film pays homage to director Ingmar Bergman, from its preoccupation with death to the Swedish-speaking goddess/narrator. Add to this the stylized gestures of the volunteer actors and the shoestring budget, and you have a recipe for kitsch.

But the piece is quite effective, especially as a first film, particularly visually. Filmed at Jekyll Island, Willeo Creek and a friend's Georgia farm, it reflects the artist's eye for composition and, in the cadence of the script, his study of world religions and myths.

In "The Wreathmaker," his last show at Whitespace, the artist created his own ritual of mourning and memory, making plaster wreaths to commemorate each casualty in the Iraq war. Though narrative replaces repetition here, this installation is a form of mourning, too.

Faced with his mother's descent into the oblivion of Alzheimer's, Sudden muses on the nature of being as the sum of one's memories. When she stopped recognizing him, it was a sort of death. The reprieve his characters receive in his story, then, is a wistful fiction.