Exhibit reviews: Viewfinder: New Images by Texas Artists and Launch

by Lucia Simek of Renegade Bus

My best friend is a photographer, and being with her is always a lesson in how the eye of a photographer works. Her Canon strapped over her shoulder at all times, she is constantly shooting pictures, constantly finding something to record in every experience, in all of life’s minutiae. She talks about the lens aiding her memory, which she says isn’t good, but that seems a reduction. I think that more than her camera serves as a memory-recorder, it has become her actual eyeball, the whole world entering into her mind first through the frame of a viewfinder, recording reams of instances that make up so many whole stories. And while she’s a whiz with words, she finds her truest way of talking through pictures; something about her capacious imagination is best revealed that way.

To me, photography has always been a puzzle. I get lost in the philosophical conundrums it creates about memory and artifact, truth and artifice; but I am, admittedly, a consummate sucker for a good shot: a thoughtful one, a beautiful one, a lucky one.

Photography’s deep visual allure is powerful strong.

As a medium, it has always played an uncertain role in the fine arts, teetering on the wobbly fence between artistic intention and happy accident, between archival tool and artistic implement. And with the proliferation of digital cameras and the splicing, dicing, or additive capabilities of photographic technology, photography as the great enigmatic medium seems truer now than ever before. But all of my mind-bending questions about the medium aside, I tend to think that photography, because of it’s complicated artistic definition, tends to find some of the most poetic ways of describing history.

I saw two shows recently, one that directly addressed contemporary photography at the Dallas Center for Contemporary Art, Viewfinder: New Images by Texas Artists, and another, Launch, that culled a great deal of it, among other work, from area MFA students at CADD Art Lab. Similarities between some of the work in these two different shows was uncanny. That’s not surprising, I suppose, if one admits to trends in image-making as testament to a collective shared feeling, to that oft-used word here, zeitgeist — the spirit of the times.

The undeniable themes that run through the work at these shows are architecture and isolation, and masks. These pictures work like portraiture, in which photography has its deepest roots, telling the story of an age (like every other) at odds with its disparate identities.

At the Contemporary, Ben Aqua’s photos show weapon-wielding, oddly-clad male fashionista terrorists standing amid the rubble of a demolished building. In one, Business Deal, insulation and drywall spill out from beneath four figures that pose for the camera in postures that are more impish than imposing. The figure on the left attempts to exert some force by standing Moses-style with his foot upon the mound of rubble and a staff in his hand; but his strength is foiled by the white leisure suit he’s sporting and the teddy bear wrapped in an afghan that he’s holding. The other three figures are masked, one in silver sunglasses and two in scarves. The motley crew looks like they are playacting ferocity in a dump, but they can’t quite muster the right vocabulary, and the group ends up revealing a rather self-absorbed complacency.

Jean Karotkin’s Mirror Series follows a group of drag queens as they primp and powder themselves before a show, transforming from wide-shouldered men into wide-shouldered, high-heeled, and eye-lashed women. As they morph from one to the other, their postures and expressions change as they assume the role of prima donna, dominatrix, or diva, until it’s impossible to tell which is the truer portrait of each man, the before or after. Is their delight in being all gussied-up real or performance?

The work of Lupita Murillo Tinnen shows the interiors of the homes of illegal immigrants. The shots are dark, the light often filtering in through drawn curtains. The mood is heavy. Ms. Tinnen makes portraits of things: a red sofa; an empty fish tank surrounded by Matchbox cars, neatly in a row; a hutch filled with dishes and a random toy; the corner of a tin-foil covered stove. The images suggest a life lived in hiding, or at least in transience, by tenants that never quite settle into their homes, living in preparation of leaving. But the images are warm, imbued with the thoughtful care of absent residents. Things stand in for their owners, keeping them safe.

Ms. Tinnen’s work finds its echo in that of UNT’s Julie Barnofski at Art Lab whose tiny, melancholic diptyches drip with the same foreboding sense of displacement. Ms. Barnofski’s are photos of the blank sides of ugly apartment houses or garages shot on grey days; or pictures taken from the outside looking in on mundane household scenes: a washer and dryer, an overstuffed couch. Like Ms. Tinnen’s, these pictures are lonely things, speaking about an isolation kept behind the thin veneers of glass and shoddy housing. Ms. Barnofski increases the palpability of these sensations through the small scale of her prints, compounding a resonate claustrophobia.

Tom Leininger’s (UNT) photos at Art Lab are largely interior shots as well. His picture Thermostat shows an empty room with a thermostat surrounded by a water stain that mimics the pattern on the wallpaper. Across the room, on another wall, is a framed picture of Jesus next to a door that’s been left ajar, letting in bright light that accentuates the dinginess of everything inside.

Back at the Contemporary, Beau Comeaux’s photo New Construction is a moody, out-of-focus picture of a white house set behind a foreground of bare dirt that’s punctuated by white PVC pipes sticking up out of the ground. The line of sight in the shot careens backward toward the house, pulled there by the clouds in the sky which gather at the peak of the roof. It has a certain gravity to it, a literal pull, that’s dizzying and off-kilter, like the impending growth of something new, this new construction, has set the world a-spin, which rings out like a threat on stability entire.

I found a counterpart to Mr. Comeaux’s work in that of UNT’s Sarah Williams at Art Lab, though she does not in fact, take pictures. Her paintings employ the same unfocused lens as Mr. Comeaux, depicting scenes of muddy lots abutting bland buildings at night, illuminated by the headlights of some off-screen vehicle. These are masterfully painted things, conveying a rich and eerie tone of the unseen and the haunting through her use of light upon the unremarkable edifices she paints.

Ms. Williams, like Comeaux, Barnofski, Leininger, and Tinnen, is telling the story of people by showing the places they inhabit. In Aqua and Korotkin’s work, the masked people play the role of the architecture or objects in the others, hiding something from view that is at odds with being seen. In all of these images, it’s the absence of these actual lives that so powerfully describes the current, and forever, disconnect between people and their built environments, people with one another, and, perhaps most importantly, the disjuncture within ourselves.