Fabulous and Photographic – Before You Now at MOAH and Multispectral at Von Lintel Gallery – by Genie Davis
Just closed at the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster, Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, dazzled with brilliance of idea, color, and technique. The exhibition was a tour de force of both traditional and more experimental photographic form.
The exhibition featured work in separate solo shows by five outstanding photographic artists: Ellen Friedlander, Naida Osline, Brad Miller, Osceola Refetoff, Andrew K. Thompson.
In Brad Miller’s Water Shadows, lush black and white patterns are hypnotic and delicate, a beautiful mix of nature’s ability to create the abstract with the photographic eye’s immersion in symmetry.
The images present three different types of water: waves, ice, and bubbles, and makes of them resonant and rich captures of light and its luminous prisms on water that are as exciting and involving as they are filled with a visionary grace.
Rightly named, Botany of Transcendence: Mythic Plants through the Lens of Naida Osline provided a lush merger of intimate images of nature with vivid color in a startlingly heightened palette. The exhibition brings together 51 pieces of the artist’s compelling botanical work from 2007 until the present, each image a revelation of wonder. Within the collection on view were five different series, each layered, mystical, and dream-like.
Her focus is primarily on fungi and plants, presenting a still, almost-sacred beauty. Her use of light makes vibrantly colored images dance. In only one of the exhibited series, Chasing Clouds, do people appear, consuming plants by smoking them, surrounded by haunting and ephemeral patterns of smoke that remind the viewer of human souls exhaled.
Speaking of the soul, The Soul Speaks from Ellen Friedlander turns photography itself into a sculptural form with brilliant, bisected images that use pin hole photography and long exposures, creating intimate and highly personal portraits. The artist then cut and divided the images she shaped, reassembling them as if the emotional puzzle that makes up all our souls was fitting itself together through the revealing eye of a camera lens.
Friedlander’s result is visionary and alchemic, a transformation of self into something graceful, elliptical, and alchemic. Always a dazzling photographic artist, here her work builds an exciting new way of looking at human subjects.
Andrew K. Thompson’s A Sky Full of Holes gives the viewer exactly what his exhibition title describes: holes within images, taken from the artist’s Chemical Landscapes series. The result is both edgy and moving, speaking to climate change, humans’ often futile attempts to change nature, and the creative impulse to both alter what appears unalterable, and press our shapes into the world.
Mysterious and compelling, Thompson’s work vibrates with an intensity enhanced by his use of two-sided, standing frames for some images, each of which are a single, intense hue altered by bleach and thread.
Osceola Refetoff’s work in his Magic and Realism, previously reviewed on this site, blends documentary subjects with surrealistic elements, taking the viewer on the road and into regions as diverse as the Mojave Desert and the Arctic Circle with galvanizing results.
A large collection of Refetoff’s work is now on view at Von Lintel Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station. Multispectral runs April 26th through June 7.
From the startling and textural color compositions depicting Palm Springs to the artist’s stunning black and white images of road and desert, Refetoff’s images edge into the surreal and dreamy while creating potent portraits of the environment as seen through a visionary eye. He utilizes a variety of approaches to shape these startling depictions from pinhole photography to infrared photography to the use of non-contemporary analog filters. Multispectral exposures combine infrared and visual spectrum light using filters in front of the lens to control the recorded wavelengths.
One of the most fascinating aspects of his work is the mix of recognizable, relatable subjects with shimmering, surreal technique. The viewer is suspended between the realistic world of architectural forms, everyday objects, wide-open desert skies and roads, and a dream that merges the past and future, a dramatic reshaping of scene into something unexpected, startling, and utterly riveting.
Always searching for interesting subjects, he doesn’t rely on a single setting or project, but rather moves between interrelated images that provide viewers with a fresh, new approach to seeing the world around us, from ice flows to the human form.
The Von Lintel exhibition offers a rare treat for LA-area viewers, as only one of the works has ever been exhibited in Los Angeles. It will be on view through June 7th.
- Genie Davis; photos by Genie Davis and provided by the artists