Years ago one of
my younger sisters complained to me that there wasn’t any real magic in the
world. We were walking around my neighborhood and I had just found a
four-leafed clover (I find them everywhere, all of the time) but that mysterious
trick of mine has stopped impressing her, and this time sparked her lament:
nothing special would come of it, nothing ever had. No, she had decided, magic
wasn’t real, not like the secret, epic, physics-defying things that happen to
heroes and heroines in books and on screen.
It’s the whole lament of the Peter
Pan story, and perhaps most people who grow up to face the responsibilities of
survival, pay bills, and panic-bustle through their adult lives. I get it. I’ve
had the privilege, in my time getting to know artists and writing about their
work, to have met scores of people who believe in magic — not because they
haven’t had to grow up and face harsh reality, but because many of them, by
nature, look at the world a bit askance and regularly experience private
moments of glowing revelation.
British artist duo Anderson &
Low, who are currently the featured artists at Eastman Museum, are without a doubt
of that ilk. Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low have collaborated for decades,
creating mind-bending bodies of photographic work and films that vary drastically
in style from project to project. But the enduring common denominator in
everything they do is observing some fascinating phenomena in the world, taking
the deepest dive into studying it, and finding the cleverest way to share what
they saw.
This entails expertly blending reality
with artifice, and whenever a seam shows, it comes as a quick wink you’re not
even sure you saw. Take, for example, the dreamy, surreal, largescale
photographs of their “Voyages” project, which is the body of work that fills
the largest gallery at the museum. Each image holds one or more ships,
seemingly suspended in or emerging from a milky, semi-opaque ether. If you’d
told me the works were modern paintings made after J.M.W. Turner’s romantic
ship scenes, I’d have believed you. They’re in fact photographs of model ships in
storage at the London Science Museum.
Anderson & Low asked to
photograph the models, but wanted to capture the scenes they saw when they
peered into the plastic-lined crates and beheld the lovingly created replicas
of ships bathed in the glowing, diffused light. In some images the wooden frame
of the crate juts into the mist, and the fantasy slips slightly as the mind
grapples with what it’s seeing. The model-makers spared no painstaking detail
in recreating the historic vessels, and though the technique of photographing
them through the plastic veils diminishes the details, Anderson & Low have somehow
activated the objects and given them the sense of adventure the boats lacked as
pristine, static things.
The Eastman exhibit features images
from several of Anderson & Low’s other bodies of work, as well as
fascinating images and objects the duo has pulled from the museum’s extensive
archives that fit their thesis of “Voyages and Discoveries,” which they say is
about the inner journey taken by viewers when they witness something magical. This
includes Carlo Naya’s 1870 albumen silver print “Place
St. Marc avec’leglise. Venise (Plaza with St. Mark’s Basilica, Venice),” which is
an empty, ordinary image of a plaza until activated by the lantern projector
that reveals a dazzling, fairyland-like scene populated by lights and night
revelers. There are countless other works of interest, and the show is worthy
of spending hours in discovery mode.
My sister was right: magic isn’t
like it’s explored in stories. It’s not something that happens to a passive
character who’s just going about their life. It’s something we are only privy
to from paying attention; it’s a covenant created within us, between phenomena
we detect and our unique, individual, processing capacities. It’s about
observation, imagination, and in the best cases, it’s translated into shareable work.
A number of
related talks and events will be presented during the run of the exhibition.
For more information, visit eastman.org.
Rebecca Rafferty is CITY’s arts and entertainment
editor. She can be reached at becca@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Nov 6-12, 2019.
