“All of my work is about the search for spirituality,” says
Lorna Bieber in the cell phone tour that accompanies “Fabrications,” an exhibit
of her largescale, black and white work currently in the Project Gallery at
Eastman Museum.
“To me, spirituality means trying to connect to the unseen
forces that lie beneath the material world,” she says. “Art seems like a
perfect place to explore this, and in my art I hope to awaken a sense of the
ineffable — a place where we stand in awe, but don’t feel diminished.”
Encountering Bieber’s work, the viewer is immersed and
invited into realms of layered or disjointed natural
imagery that suggest a narrative, but require the audience’s participation in
filling in the blanks.
“Storytelling has always been important to me,” Bieber says.
“There’s always an implied narrative in my work, but I’ve never been interested
in producing a straightforward linear story.”
Bieber’s “Houses” is a grid of 96 prints on paper, made of shots
of barns, citadels, towers, and country homes that are each outlined with thick
brushstrokes. The angled buildings are set again clouds, trees, and terrain,
but it’s disjointed from any smooth flow between one and the next.
Quilt-like and out of sequence, this patchwork of a region’s
structures forces the eye to skip across time and space to reconstruct what
might be.
“I wanted to create ruptures, I wanted to disrupt our usual
way of seeing,” she says. “Each individual image is a fragment, a subplot to
the entire piece. And as our eye leaps from picture to picture and section to
section, our brain fills in gaps of time and perception.”
Bieber’s background is in painting, but she became interested
in the photographic image as subject while working in the art department and
then as a photo editor for large-circulation magazines in the late-1980’s. For
more than 20 years, she’s developed methods of photocopying and manipulating
stock images — enlarging or reducing, drawing and painting over them, and often
presenting them arranged into largescale grids.
Much of the work in this show takes nature as its subject,
though Bieber’s most recent efforts include figurative and allegorical
elements.
Aside from the “Houses” installation, the gallery’s first
room holds five large gelatin silver prints. In one of the largest prints,
“Sled,” a dog strains in the snow to tow its titular burden, which is just emerging
from off-shot as two tusk-like runners.
Nearby, in “Bush,” three dogs race past some tall, scratchy
brush, connected to one another by lines, their tongues lolling from the
effort.
Bieber says her series on dogs was kick-started after she saw
a PBS program about rescue working dogs that assist the handicapped. “These
weren’t cute pets; they hadn’t been formed into frightening guard dogs,” she
says. “I wanted to capture their innate dignity.”
This series marked a turning point in her work, she says. Up
until this point, she’d felt that she needed to make her alterations of her
source photos overtly visible, either by collaging or drawing on the photos.
“With the dogs, I finally understood that the alterations I
made in my studio — cropping the work and altering it on my copier, and the
interventions in the darkroom creating a surface that moved in and out of
focus, drastically changing the scale, changing the tonalities — that these
were sufficient,” she says.
Bieber aims to make viewers feel that they might walk into
the photo by playing with focus throughout each image. Blurred sections over
parts of the rushing beasts and the snowbound environment suggest the eye
trying to reconcile motion directly in front of it. All of this is playfully at
odds with the stark, photocopied texture that collapses the scene once more.
The presence of this texture in the woodland image, “Path,”
suggests a jacquard weaving of a snowy, shadowy trail more than a photo
collage. This is also the desired effect for Beiber’s
“Tapestry,” a photo collage printed on canvas that fills the long wall of the
gallery’s inner room, and was debuted with the opening of this exhibit.
This work was inspired by a close encounter with the minutia
in a corner of a massive tapestry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When passing
by the giant weaving, Bieber was caught up by an eye-level section that was
“teeming with images — insects and flowers and birds, and different kinds of
grasses and plants,” she says. “You could have spent an hour just looking at
six square inches of this piece.”
Her own “Tapestry” is likewise vibrating with life — an
effect enhanced by her minimalist and high-contrast palette of black and white.
But instead of an idyllic ramble of figures in fields, Bieber’s domesticated
Eden is a patchwork world, with sharply defined vignettes of blossoms,
branches, wings, and houses, repeating as a constellation over a permeating,
wild darkness.
Bieber says she means to provide “glimpses, fragments that
stack up to form an enigmatic whole,” and that her influences in this mode of
storytelling include comic books, tapestries, frescoes, quilts, and stained
glass windows.
“My aim is certainly not to frustrate the viewer; I want to
involve them,” she says, adding that she herself enjoys the hunt for meaning
and visual subtext. “If something is missing, I find that I’m forced to become
more of a participant.”
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2016.
