‘Stephen Berkman: Chamber Pieces’

Entering Stephen Berkman’s show at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Art Gallery, seeing the sepia-toned prints in heavy, dark wood frames by the light of bare incandescent bulbs, you might think the artist is one of those historical reenactors who adopt the dress, mode, thought and practices of another era.

Berkman’s heart does reside in the 19th century -- his work revives obsolete photographic methods and he favors antique equipment -- but he’s not simply a historical ventriloquist, voicing a mute past. Berkman is more cunning than that, and his work is more intriguing and complex.

He’s a 21st century trickster, blurring boundaries and shifting shapes so that identity (his, his work’s, his subjects’) becomes fluid, multiple. He occupies dual time zones simultaneously, invoking the idioms of the past (which tend to be perceived as “natural”) through the self-consciousness of the present. He stages photography’s magic as he elucidates its science. The result is a true occasion -- surprising, amusing, edifying and seductive.

Berkman’s photographs and an installation line the perimeter of the gallery, and the center of the room contains three more installations, each a marvel of ingenuity. “A Natural History of Natural History” has two parts that are interdependent yet viewed separately. An old-fashioned glass display case holds a taxidermied hornbill, perched on a branch, above a mossy floor. The background recalls natural history museum dioramas in its suggestion of a broad landscape of leafy trees.

In the small gallery directly behind the display case stands an artificial, miniature landscape, mounted upside down on a pedestal, beneath a bright light. A large-format camera aims its lens directly at the little props, and it suddenly becomes evident that this is the same landscape that appears behind the bird in the museum case. The back wall of the display case is the ground glass of the camera, with its “live feed” of the constructed landscape. The rules of optics flip the subject, so it reads right side up, and the image fills the frame so, as background to the bird, it looks full scale.

Berkman’s orchestration of the component parts is deft. It demonstrates at once the veracity and trickery of camera vision. The image is true, and yet the context deceives us into believing it is something else.

“Alternating Eye” also occupies two spaces, divided by a wall. The installation is equally captivating but more enigmatic. The two setups mirror each other, each consisting of a tripod supporting a sphere barnacled in colored glass eyes and a rectangular, gridded surface that resembles a camera’s ground glass. A lens connects the two rooms.

In 10-second increments, a bright light illuminates the glassy ball in one room, then switches off and lights the ball in the other. When each room is dark, an image of the eye-ball (in the other room?) is visible on the translucent rectangular glass. The light goes on and off in slow blinks, revealing and concealing, revealing and concealing. It’s a strange, compelling phenomenon, explained as simply, perhaps, as back-to-back camera obscuras, but still viscerally mysterious.

In the third small interior gallery, Berkman presents “Looking Glass,” a camera built of clear glass. Its lens aims at a yellowed skull, which appears, inverted, on the camera’s back surface. Photography’s fundamental principles are made lucid in the installation, and its haunting aspects too. The image of the skull floats within an orb of blackness -- a captive, a treasure, a conquest of sorts, an emblem of death eternally prolonged.

Berkman, who is based in Pasadena, employs a variety of old photographic methods to make his prints. Images made from wet collodion negatives look tenuous around the edges from the drips and streaks of the hand-applied liquid emulsion.

In its early decades, as now, one of photography’s chief functions was to document the exotic, unusual and incredible. It served science and pseudo-science equally. Berkman stages wonderfully sober portraits of twins conjoined by a mustache, a gentleman holding a device identified as “The Model Universe,” a pair of men flanking a tiny, three-fingered, silver-bodied alien.

The subjects are dressed and coiffed in 19th century fashion, and they adopt the stiff, serious poses of early portraits, no matter that a sweet-faced young woman in one picture is shown knitting a condom and a military man in another earnestly proffers a hairy dirt ball as the “Root of Evil.” Berkman is coy, at times reveling in time-warped absurdities and at others amplifying the poignancy of our capacity actually to look back into the past.

A few other delights round out the exhibition. In an astute essay accompanying the show, Laband director and curator Carolyn Peter aptly describes the experience of Berkman’s work as destabilizing. The trickster is all about disrupting familiar categories, expanding our perceptions through brilliant deceit. Berkman owns the part.

Ollman is a freelance writer.

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