By STEVE PFARRER
Small but detailed portraits from the natural world. Abstract images, bordering on the surreal, created by using reflective, curved surfaces as a backdrop. Close-ups of a mysterious, mottled surface. Family snapshots that are redefined as part of painted wood cubes.
In a new show at Gallery A3 in Amherst, six members of the cooperative exhibit space have come together to offer a varied collection of photographs, some as part of mixed-media packages and others as a series of studies.
And in “Six,” which runs through Aug. 27, the focus in not on size but detail and presentation. The photographs, all on the small to medium side, are given plenty of space, with each artist’s work set apart from that of the others.
Marianne Connolly, one of the contributing artists and a communications liaison for the gallery, said she’d been looking to mount a show focused on photography for some time. She noted that many members of Gallery A3 are painters or mixed media artists, and shows at the gallery tend to reflect that.
“We have photography from time to time, but we haven’t had a group show like this in quite a while,” said Connolly, who works as both a fine art photographer and in photographic collage.
Connolly often uses series of photographs, many with small images, to record her observations of light and shadow and the ordinary objects she encounters during late afternoon or nighttime walks. For the current exhibition, she focused on something that likely rarely gets much notice: a dumpster behind the CVS store in downtown Amherst.
In “Small Terrain,” Connolly offers a series of 16 inkjet prints, all 8 x 8 inches, that feature close-ups of mottled surfaces, where peeling paint, patches of rust and partially covered letters create a surprisingly colorful and tactile mosaic.
She’s found mystery in the mundane, too. At first glance, some of the pictures, like “Inlet,” might be mistaken for sections of a relief map of an imaginary land, with large patches of blue standing in for water and sections of peeling paint representing rough terrain.
Larry Rankin, whose work hangs next to Connolly’s, offers a sharp contrast but also focuses on details, in this case of the natural world: woodland and field, rock-studded seashore, grasses and reeds. His 81 photos are grouped in sections of nine, each with its own theme, and all are framed against a polished, black wooden backdrop.
“Lines and Angles,” for instance, includes images of bent reeds jutting from snow and water to form inverted “V’s,” and of an ice crystal and a thin, multi-pointed tree branch that’s photographed against snowy ground.
“Photography for me is a journey of discovery,” Rankin writes in an artist’s statement. “Discovered details [create] moments of awe, mystery, and even worship. Nine by Nine is comprised of 81 such moments, each a vivid memory for me.”
In “One Rainy Day in Early May,” Gloria Kegeles takes the opposite tact. She usually photographs at vintage car shows and uses reflected light and the chrome and high gloss of the vehicles to create abstract, almost surreal images that curve and swirl in myriad ways — what she calls “lenticular variations heretofore unnoticed by our eyes’ lenses.”
She says she doesn’t manipulate her images on a computer.
In this case, Kegeles took photos at a car show on a drizzly day, and the water adds yet another element to her portraits. She’s also included a few images in which her reflected hands and camera can be seen, though they’re distorted as though viewed in a funhouse mirror.
Rochelle Shicoff, who’s primarily a painter, and Sue Katz, who works with paint and mixed media to create what she calls “constructs,” take a more straightforward approach to their photos in the exhibit — but with a twist nevertheless.
Katz, for example, has taken old family snapshots — her children when they were younger, as well as her grandchildren — and added them to painted, wooden blocks, with a clear sheen to give the old pictures a shiny look.
As she writes in a statement, she’s “assembling objects and imagery, the visual and the conceptual — new combinations in the old context of relationships, family, and lineage in which the square and the cube represent one life, one spirit, one joyful being.”
Shicoff offers multiple images from a trip to Japan in which she visited wooded public areas where visitors can drink fresh water and rest. Her photos, which she has woven into a decorated linen scroll, depict highlights such as bamboo ladles for pouring water and sculptural pedestals where water is stored.
The sixth artist, Rebecca Muller, works primarily in mixed media, often using found objects. She’s employed some of these, like small pieces of sculpted wood, to frame her photos, which were taken earlier this year as she spent time with her dying father.
Muller said she was with her father at a hospice in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and her photos vary between portraits of her father in his last days and of the countryside around the community, where she took walks. Called “In a Slight Yellow Light,” her show includes a particularly striking image of a patch of reflected sunlight on water in a gorge, photographed through a screen of very young trees.
In her artist’s statement, Muller relates that when she was 4, she first realized her parents would die — a thought that filled her with grief and fear that stayed with her for a long time. But eventually those feelings softened, she said, “as my dad moved with great delight, fully into deep old age, and I came to a tempered place of enjoying the breathing moments left with him.”
In the end, she says she sees her exhibit as “a photo-narrative of the body leaving its corporeal being.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
Gallery A3 is at 28 Amity St. in Amherst. For information, visit gallerya3.com.