THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406170102
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY VIRGINIA VAN HORN, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
Wide-open spaces are a mythic presence in America's art, literature and folklore. Myth and reality are juxtaposed in ``Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary American Landscape Photography'' at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts. On display through July 5 are 131 photographs from the collection of the National Museum of American Art in Washington.
{REST} This is not a show of calendar art, but one of technically superb, visually complex images. They are often beautiful but rarely pretty. The exhibition's preference is clearly for the well-made photograph; there's little representation of the random, ``snapshot'' aesthetic. Many of the works are related to the 19th century pictorial tradition, to Romantic painting and its vision of the sublime. Panoramic photographs such as Gus Foster's ``Cut Wheat'' and Stuart Klipper's ``Snake River Gorge Bridge, Twin Falls, Idaho'' are direct descendants of the enormous, sweeping canvases of 19th century American painters Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church.
Exhibition curator Merry Foresta describes this contemporary art as ``a new brand of romanticism - part pastoral, part irony.'' The ironic stance, which seems to be art's modern condition, is expressed in images of artificiality and contrary juxtapositions of man and nature. Len Jenshel makes the authentic appear artificial and the artificial authentic. In ``Monument Valley, Navajo Tribal Park, Arizona,'' he manages to make the buttes of Monument Valley (scene of so many Hollywood movies) look as false as a studio backdrop. At first glance, Jenshel's ``State Highway 128 Near Fisher Tower, Utah'' portrays a grand vista of lake, bridge and cliffs. Only a closer look reveals that this detailed landscape is carefully painted on the side of a building.
Foresta deliberately eliminated any depictions of people from her selections, but the human presence is no less evident. Three molded plastic chairs are the appreciative audience for a radiant landscape in Jim Stone's ``Fisher's Landing: Martinez Lake, Arizona.'' Surrogates for human beings, they are homely, goofy witnesses, the ``Three Stooges'' under a celestial sky.
``Alaska Pipeline'' by Skeet McAuley records the integration of nature and technology. In an idyllic landscape, industry is an insidious, almost invisible intruder. Camouflaged by a screen of silvery birch trees, the silver pipeline sneaks along like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.
The human presence is specifically the artist's presence in works by Karen Halverson, Mark Klett and Kenda North. In the tradition of Ansel Adam's famous self-portrait (in which he photographed his shadow cast across the floor of Monument Valley), these artists document their own identifying marks.
Halverson's images of the California desert include her car - a modern burro that carries her faithfully through desolate terrain. In her ``Marks on the Landscape Series,'' North draws on top of images of desert plants, her wiry lines echoing the plant's spiky forms.
John Divola goes one step further; he makes his landscape himself in ``Cyclone on the Beach.'' Like God on a budget, Divola creates his cyclone out of papier-mache and chicken wire, his beach from paint and his sun out of a few well-placed studio lights.
Divola's actions may be Godlike, but his results are closer to pathos than omnipotence. His cyclone isn't some catastrophic force; instead, its lumpy, handmade form is touching and intimate.
Divola is only one of numerous artists whose work is melancholy and romantic - the exhibition's prevailing tone. Images of splendor and solitude seem secretly wistful, as if yearning for a lost Eden. From Richard Misrach's meditations on mortality to John Pfahl's abstract harmonies, the wilderness endures despite its battering, while man's artifacts are ephemeral. The shade of Shelley's ``Ozymandias'' is evoked in Lois Conner's ``St. George's Hotel, Brooklyn, New York,'' where the hotel's chimneys bear an eerie resemblance to the columns of ancient Egypt, silhouetted against the fading Manhattan skyline. Even in John Yang's ``Somerset Hills Country Club Golf Course,'' that cheerful insignia of progress and civilization is no more than a misty dream. by CNB