Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 18, 1990 TAG: 9003152236
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-21 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ann Weinstein
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"Synchronicity/Penetrating the Surface," her autobiographical show of pinhole photography at North Cross School, says otherwise.
Made in 1988, the hand colored print "Coffee" is a fairly straightforward self-portrait - except for the fact that her face is hidden by a pair of sunglasses and a raised coffee cup. Made in 1990, "Pinhole photograph of four TVs playing a video of myself as moon" is fragmented, repetitive, scary and, as the extended title implies, self-absorbed. In it, Nolan-Rogers hides behind a moon-shaped mask.
The moon is an apt symbol for these and other dualities in the show. Because of its cycles and periodic phases, it is a female symbol characterizing change, creation and imagination. But it also symbolizes loss of identity, dismemberment, death.
Despite the fact that the moon is associated with cycles and multiples, the rest of the moon series consists of single images, which are equally terrifying. The artist is trapped inside the iron moon-mask and behind the grid formed by the mullions in a glass door. She crouches, crawls on all fours or lies, isolated and withdrawn, in a warped landscape.
Many of the distortions in the photographs are due to the nature of pinhole photography, which Nolan-Rogers exploits to disturbing ends. She also invents a few distortions of her own.
Skewed light and dark areas in the compositional structure of "Out of the Deep" - a turmoil of topsy-turvy images - jostle each other for breathing space. The faded, ordinary, descriptive passages seem almost illegible, and negligible. But they contribute a sense of loss or near-emptiness to the picture's fracture and disruption.
Reading across jumbled and repetitious images in narrow horizontal pictures confers a sense of movement and, therefore, time. But ghostly surroundings and blurry surfaces induce a sense of fading, and even suspended, time. A couple of the irregularly-shaped rectangles picture cut-off, multiple selves in disjointed surroundings. Others include family groupings of children and a dominant male figure strumming his guitar.
Lest I have misled you, these are not chaotic images. They are intelligently constructed images about a chaotic state.
Hand-tinted photographs in an earlier series focus on mostly single, central objects. Incongruously, they project less urgency and less reality than the multiple images, with their incomplete forms - perhaps because their subject matter consists of trivial objects instead of people.
Taken over a period of two years, the photographs have grown enormously in concept and corresponding pictorial arrangements. All of them are mounted on mats with ordinary corner tabs, much like a family album, and surrounded with narrow or wide black edges. Both devices negate the notion of photography as a descriptive medium and present it as a conceptual and interpretive process.
The show runs through March 28. The Living Gallery, North Cross School, 4254 Colonial Ave. S.W., is open during school hours.
Barbara Morgan is a painter, printmaker and the photographer who took the picture above. It is an icon of the dance.
A large exhibition, covering almost 70 years of Morgan's work, is being held in the Pannell Gallery in conjunction with this year's Ewald Symposium at Sweet Briar College in Amherst.
You may not recognize Morgan's name, most likely because she did not present or perceive of herself as an art photographer. She thought she was merely recording the art of dance.
In fact, she took the dance pictures as autonomous photographs, and captured the essence of movement in dramatic, isolated and frozen frames. Shot in the studio or on stage under controlled circumstances, they never were taken during actual performances.
Among Morgan's most famous photographs, a series of theatrical, intense images captures the dancer Martha Graham as a knitted column of a figure, a striped eccentricity, a taut zigzag, a light-hearted leap, a semi-circular swoosh.
These pictures were taken before Graham attained wide fame, and no doubt contributed to it. They were presaged by Morgan's distant woodcut of Indian "Rain Dancers," painted in 1931.
Morgan taught at UCLA and obviously was aware of ideas circulating in the art world. The realistic, heroic figures in "Divers: Harlem Pool," a black-and-white lithograph dated 1934, are reminiscent of Reginald Marsh. Totally different in style and emotional aura, the explosive strokes in an abstract ink drawing suggest etched lines by Gabor Peterdi. Her light drawings made in the '30s and '40s were influenced by Man Ray's photograms. Morgan described the difficult times of the late '30s in political photomontages. In "Protest," a colossus steps lively over a dense crowd, dissolving at the upper edge. In another, the distorted, grinning face of William Randolph Hearst is centered in the tentacles of an octopus form and superimposed on the tiny forms of a gathering crowd.
The sinuous forms of tulips in the photomontage "Spring on Madison Square" presage Robert Mapplethorpe. Whatever the differences in style or media, Morgan's affinity for movement unifies the show. A 1927 woodcut; an isolated, undulating corn leaf, photographed in 1947; and the lateral extension of figure in a 1941 dance study share the same arcing movement through space. Swooping brushstrokes in "Visit from Another Planet" look like golden arcs. Did they have UFO's then? McDonalds?
Although Morgan had a modernist sensibility, precedents can be claimed for much of her work. But not for her dance photography, which set precedent instead of following it.
The show runs through April 15. Pannell Center Gallery, Sweet Briar College, is open Tuesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m.
by CNB