Vital Signs:
Focus on Young Photographers, on view at the George Eastman House,
is a thoughtful selection of photographs by 12 emerging artists from five
different countries.
Seen collectively, there is in these
photographs beauty and terror — as well as a level of theatricality.
Something seems just a little off. It’s a familiar notion in the art world, and
one that should seem familiar to us today. That sensation was the epitome of
the 19th-century Romantics’ notion of the sublime — feelings of awe mixed
with terror. And in light of recent years’ events, the dawn of the 21st century
would seem to fit that description.
While each image is reflective of the
artist’s individual visual vocabulary, all are examining aspects of the
contemporary world — a world that is not what it seems or is changing right
before our eyes. There is something almost melancholic about these photographs.
Chris McCaw’s Old Tree Split from Heavy Chop is one of several haunting platinum
prints depicting aspects of his grandfather’s almond orchard in the central
valley of California. The fate of the orchard is in question: It’s no longer a
working farm and the area around it is increasing encroached upon by suburban
sprawl. Today, all that yet remains is his frail widowed grandmother — all,
that is, except for the grandeur of the tough, old trees, standing proud in the
eerie pervasiveness of the valley fog.
The images are reminiscent of P.B.
Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias,” where he writes of the shattered “King of Kings,”
about whom “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck,
boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The eerie quotient is also present in
Lori Nix’s tabletop tableau photographs. On the one hand, they’re kind of fun
and funny — in one image, you have little houses swimming in (presumably)
chocolate pudding while in another vividly colored toy trains are piled in a
wonderfully messy heap — but on the other hand, they’re really uncomfortably
familiar and therefore ominous subjects: floods, train wrecks, disasters.
They’re appealingly pop but upon further consideration, they’re also shocking.
It’s that Warholian crash thing. We’re horrified, maybe even offended, but we
keeping looking.
For many viewers, art as an intimate
medium for conveying emotion remains the order of the day. Certainly, a number
of artists have endeavored to dispel that, to turn the tables on what art is or
should be. Yet, the power to emote — whether consciously or not — is always
there.
Consider, for example, Bogota (February 7, 2003) from The Day After series. Johannes Hepp
presents us with a technically seamless, seemingly benign panorama of everyday
street life. But here again there is this edgy, if not horrific, undercurrent:
The composite images are of actual sites of various acts of terrorism around
the world. The photographs were made days or sometimes even years after a car
bombing, gas attack, or plane crash-as-suicide bomb literally ripped through a
community.
It’s not so much the immediate
aftermath that viewers are asked to contend with but rather how life does go
on: how everyday acts, like riding the subway or just crossing the street,
become fraught with risk-taking.
You should go
if you’d
like to see a solid collection of photographs that reach beyond beauty to the
eerie undercurrent — maybe even the “sublime.”
Vital Signs: Focus on Young Photographers through
October 9 at the George Eastman House, 900 East Avenue.
| A roundtable talk and gallery tour with the artists is on Saturday, September
17, at 2 p.m. in the Curtis Theatre, followed by a book signing and
meet-and-greet. | Hours: Tuesday through Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday
nights until 8 p.m., and Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. $3-$8. 271-3361, www.eastmanhouse.org
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.
