ART REVIEWS : OCC Exhibits Feature Uelsmann Fantasies, Hand-Crafted Photos

Jerry Uelsmann seems loathe to trade in his ‘60s style; it remains as stubbornly unchanged as a guy who still drives a VW split-window bus and won’t throw out his sandals. A sampling of Uelsmann’s black-and-white, multiple-image fantasy photographs at Orange Coast College’s Photography Gallery (through Mar. 16) raises the question of whether it is possible to be too blindly committed to one’s original vision.

A photograph from 1969 offers a tree suspended, roots and all, over a tiny island in a crystalline body of water. In a print from 1981, a knot floats above a Lazy Susan on a big round table. Giant hands curl around a rock with ominous dark stains in a 1970 photograph. In a work from 1987, rocks with superimposed images of a forest scene and a woman’s face sit mysteriously in a barren setting.

Not too long ago, Uelsmann was one of the bright lights of photography. A student of Minor White, he absorbed his mentor’s interest in transforming elements of the natural world into a kind of visual poetry.

White believed, as he wrote 30 years ago, in “free(ing) himself of the tyranny of the visual facts . . . of surfaces and textures, substance and form” by using the camera “as a metamorphosing machine” so that the resulting photograph would be “a metaphor.” Uelsmann went a step further and created his transformations in the darkroom. The imaginary views in his photographs, including extreme contrasts in the scale of objects (such as the image of a woman superimposed on a man’s open hand), are created through adroitly combined “sandwiches” and juxtapositions of multiple negatives.

Uelsmann employs this essentially 19th-Century photographic technique in a highly refined, contemporary way, as a tool to let him discover the imaginative possibilities of his raw material. His eye also must have been seasoned by the work of surrealist painters, particularly Rene Magritte. In an image of a rectangular “box” of sky hanging over the ocean, the photographer’s debt to the Belgian seems obvious.

In an era colored by the counterculture glorification of dream- and drug-induced altered perception, Uelsmann’s through-the-looking-glass vision had enormous appeal.

But time moves on, artistic emphases shift, and re-evaluation is inevitable. With some still-dazzling exceptions--like the famous 1976 image of a tiny man walking on a book in a library open to the sky, or an ominous 1982 photo of a rowboat adrift beneath a partial solar eclipse--what once seemed an enchanted way of looking at the world now seems based on a predictable repertoire of levitating tricks and superimpositions.

As it turns out, the more intriguing photo exhibit at Orange Coast is in the newly revamped Art Gallery. “One of a Kind,” through Wednesday, features the work of four Southern Californians whose images employ photography-as-we-know-it as the basis of a hand-crafted process.

“Recluse” is a huge, painterly “photogram” (made by placing objects between light-sensitive paper and a light source) by Susan Rankaitis, who mingles dark, metallic-tinged images of plunging aircraft fragments, bodies of water and a tiny spaceman. Realms of disaster and danger gleam seductively, offering a shifting, elusive vision.

Cam Slocum works with photographic images from various sources to create large, shadowy black-and-white images on canvas. A blurry, spectral view of freeway arteries, faded at the edges like an old photograph, is one of several works entitled “Lost.” Another is a magnified image of the innards of a circuit board. Yet another shows a portly woman in a print dress touching the dark, hairy head of a sleeping man, her mouth open in horror.

Elizabeth Bryant’s smartly designed photograms offer attempts at symbolism that seem either utterly baffling or superficial. The floating array of images in each may be meaningful to Bryant but look too cute and seem too randomly chosen for the viewer to make any worthwhile connections.

In “Heart/Watch,” the yellow outline of a watch slithers across a black heart shape. Dancing through the image are white silhouettes of fish, a necklace, a shell, reaching hands, and an item that looks like a sheriff’s badge. In “Composite Atom,” a pink atom races around two silhouetted profiles filled with white images of keys, a vase, a house, a skeleton and a diagram of seasonal changes.

The fourth artist, Stephen Berens, turns NASA photographs into three-dimensional collages named after planets and satellites. Tipped out from the wall, peppered with skinny cutouts and small black squiggles and tinted with strong colors, these pieces seem more decorative than deep.

Still, the caliber of the show as a whole is very encouraging for a gallery previously known for dreary exhibits of undistinguished material.

With guest curator Sylvia Impert, who teaches in the Orange Coast photography department, and professional installation by gallery co-director Eric Gaard, “One of a Kind” is close to being the very model of a community college art gallery offering. The next level of refinement: a more serious and useful brochure (however cheaply printed) that puts the work on view in a social and art-historical context.

The Jerry Uelsmann exhibit continues through March 16 at the Orange Coast College Photography Gallery, Room 101-A of the Fine Arts Building on campus. Hours: 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday. Information: (714) 432-5524.

“One of a Kind,” at the Orange Coast College Art Gallery, continues through Wednesday. Hours: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and evenings by appointment. Information: (714) 432-5039.

Admission to both galleries is free.