The New York-based artist Alexandra do Carmo, originally from Portugal, has created a new series of drawings. Taking her cue from a photograph of chimpanzees seen in a natural history museum, do Carmo has drawn a sequence of chimpanzee heads, whose gaze clearly follows the studio in which the artist has drawn her imagery; the content of what the animal sees is directly visible in the eyes of the chimps, usually depicted one to a page, very lightly but also definitively drawn on paper. Do Carmo has drawn attention for a previous body of work - an imagery of dinosaurs, in particular Tyrannosaurus Rex, based on an original picture in a children's book - which also subjects the viewer to an imagination cogent in its implications for an engaged esthetic. Just as the fierce jaws of the raptor, drawn with infinite care and subtlety, challenges in its delicate outline the limits of what we can see and believe, so are we, as do Carmo's audience, asked to imagine the monkey taking in the reality of the studio, the artist's site for work and transformation. The chimpanzee, genetically the creature closest to humans, offers his gaze, which is essentially a private matter, to the audience, who watch him with the due privileges of belonging to a higher species.

It may well be, however, that this privilege is a matter for argument; the story that goes on in the chimpanzees' eyes gives the lie to any smug assumption we may have about social or genetic hierarchies. We should remember that in the first fifteen to eighteen examples of do Carmo's series, the monkey is looking at the studio, registering emotions that have to do with the specificities of place, or more exactly, the space of creativity. The animals' gaze is not so much a reproach as a question: How does the artist communicate to an audience that we assume can see but cannot truly understand? There is a chair in the studio reflected in the monkey's gaze; that chair is a stand-in not only for the artist's presence but for the human viewer as well, who considers the animal's gaze with a gaze of his own. It is not fair to call do Carmo a purely symbolic artist - her intelligence is too acute, and too public, to be only privately meaningful; her gaze is not only her own, but the chimpanzee's as well, because she is the author of an image that carries a certain independence of mind. All sorts of allusions are taking place, within a sequence that may safely be called narrative and allegorical, in the sense that the drawings enact a reality that extends from the artist to the image to those who see that image, its meaning elaborated by the group of drawings acting within time.

In the drawings that immediately follow, images eighteen through twenty-six, the chair has disappeared and the studio is more or less empty. As the sequence continues, the monkey starts to blend in with the architectural elements of the space - the walls, the ceiling, the windows - so that its body encompasses not only its interior but its exterior as well. As the monkey becomes one with what it sees - surely this is a potent metaphor for creativity - the deconstruction of the animal is reiterated in the seeming breakdown of the drawing itself. Here the imagination is at sea, so that the ensuing chaos becomes a metaphor for a lost self, a vulnerable vision of the world surrounding the most important faculty the monkey and its author have - the capability of seeing, from both a personal and abstract point of view. Once the twenty-eighth drawing has been negotiated, the window becomes the primary focus not only of the viewer's attention, but also that of the chimp. The window reflected in the monkey's eyes becomes bright green, with the eyes resembling a close-up of the window. In the next drawing the eyes turn green, and the monkey has escaped the studio, so that he is outside. In the two following drawings it is possible to see three small monkey figures inside the eyes, while in the next drawing two different chimps are in a green field, looking into two others.

The visual complexity in these drawings acts as a metaphor for the chimp's and our creative attention. The intricacy of what the chimp sees is linked to the vision of the artist creating the situation. At times, the environment includes the external world; at other times, the monkey sees versions of himself - in other words, he confronts his own double while standing in for the artist's inventiveness. The question of otherness also comes into play; the monkeys embody their creator, serving both as indices of the creator's self and subject matter in their own right. In drawings thirty-eight to forty-three, four chimps appear, each different from the other. But by looking at their eyes, the viewer can see the place where they are. On the table that is part of the monkeys' environment you can see four rolls of paper - this signals the fact that the chimps are building a project together, which is marked by "errors" that differentiate the drawing from the original photo; lines, arrows, circles, squares return the audience to the construction of the drawing and enhance the concept of drawing, and its perceived mistakes, as essential to the drawing process.

In the forty-third to fiftieth drawings the chimps abandon the studio space while the table is moved to the outside; it sits on the grass with four chairs, and in the sequence the monkeys, now become human figures, take their seats. In drawings forty-five through fifty, unfinished figures return to the metaphysical fiction of the drawings and their contents, and at the same time vacate the chairs within the monkeys' eyes. As they do this, the figures begin to show up on the drawing itself, while in the last drawing, the artist returns to the monkey's eyes, inside of which one sees many people's silhouettes, which appear to come toward them and the viewer as well. Throughout the sequence do Carmo is relating a tale of visible mistakes that pay homage to the difficulties of the drawing process; the monkeys embody creativity but they also enact it, so that the gap between creator and created is summarily abolished. The appearance of visitors in the last drawing refers to the presence of an audience, the last event in the construction of imagined reality in art. The monkeys and what they see are palpable evidence of the imagination, whose very nature is ethereal and ephemeral: they give do Carmo the substance of a theme. Even as the chimps deliberately expand do Carmo's topic of embodied creativity and its inevitable tendency toward flaws, there is room for human error; mistakes are a natural part of the drawing process and must be incorporated into any theory of an imagined act. In this body of work, the artist has posited a concept that includes the identification of herself with her subject matter, in a self-aware, sharply conceived notion of what she is responsible for in drawing. The mergers effected during the sequence conflate object and subject, generating a tonic ambiguity that is all inclusive of the artist and her world. Do Carmo's typically subtle, seemingly self-effacing creativity suggests an idiom of loss; however, that loss is not perceived as a negation but rather an honest acknowledgment of the mistake as integral to the drawing process. Without it we become perfection and lose the merely human, just as the chimpanzees lose their vision of a unified field, which exists only as a utopian topic inherent within creativity; we know that its utopian character can never be realized. Under these circumstances, do Carmo has quite realistically directed her attention to art as an all-consuming process, rather than an easily digested product. Her work becomes an example of the imagination at work, digesting material in the hopes of becoming truthful and accurate in regard to creative originality.