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ART REVIEW : ‘Photographic’ Show Offers Two Visions

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Times Staff Writer

“Picture a very dark alley illuminated by the light from somebody’s kitchen or a flashing neon sign or one low street lamp,” Eileen Cowin writes about her 36-foot-long series of silver gelatin photographs, curving seamlessly across a darkened room in the Cal State Fullerton Art Gallery.

“There on a cold damp night . . .Alfred Hitchcock meets Rene Magritte, Raymond Chandler collides with Edward Hopper. . . .”

Cowin achieves a film noir moodiness in her portion of the exhibit, “The Photographic: Two Points of View,” with dramatic lighting that picks seemingly troubled or malevolent characters out of a secretive black background.

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Glimpsed in the gloom are a wistful woman in a bride’s veil; a man in a trench coat descending a flight of stairs, seen from the rear on a closed-circuit video camera; a woman in velvet on a park bench; two men in crisp white shirts reeling backward; an alienated couple; a troubled woman behind a window with filmy curtains; a prowling dog; a man’s polished shoes resting on concrete.

Yet the cumulative effect of these intensely stage-managed tableaux falls curiously flat. The narrative gaps between the image are huge chasms dauntingly difficult for the viewer to cross and offering only fragile footbridges for the imagination to seize upon.

Rather than suggesting plausible scenarios, the photographs seem to be about the mechanics of creating suspense--the way a film maker can play on viewers’ expectations about certain kinds of imagery and invest innocuous images with powerful associations. Cowin’s images call up the ghosts of filmic images past and offer a set of “clues” to a potential mystery--an aura of tension, expectation and sadness. But their airless presentation seems deliberately to sidestep the aspect of viewer-involvement that makes film such a compelling medium.

In this sense the title of the piece seems ironic: Lot’s wife looked back at Sodom and was turned into a pillar of salt; Cowin looks back in a self-conscious way at the process by which filmic reality is created and her work hardens into a stylistic parody of itself.

The other “point of view” in the show (on view through March 5) belongs to Darryl Curran, who has chosen to highlight the enduring aspects of his technically exploratory work of the past 23 years.

In an installation called “Photographic Memory,” he pays homage in an ingenuous way to a raft of photographers and others who have influenced him by setting up a group of cameras in front of three-dimensionally enhanced photo-blowups evoking a trio of famous works by Andre Kertesz, Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg.

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When you look through each viewfinder, you see one of these works in juxtaposition with an image by a contemporary photographer (Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Robert Heinecken and others). The layerings that result seem entirely arbitrary, though the sight of Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat from his “Monogram” hovering behind Bruce Davidson’s portrait of a muskrat trapper and his family offers an unexpectedly piquant collision of themes.

In his own photographs, Curran has explored the effects of superimposition in such amusingly bizarre images as a black-and-white film transparency that gives a woman the appearance of simultaneously facing front, fully dressed, and backward, in the nude.

He also likes to give photographic negatives the kind of center-stage treatment usually accorded only to the positive print. A 1987 series of images of a Kress store plaza--paper negatives made with a pinhole camera--tease the viewer with unsettling reversals of black to white. When Curran finally gives us a reassuring positive print of the courtyard, the soft blacks give the banal scene the poetic presence of a vintage print from the early 1900s.

In “Child Angel/Angel Child,” an old lantern slide of a painting of a nude youth, labeled “child angel” is attached upside down to a silver gelatin print of a young boy standing in an abandoned gas station near a depressing, rubble-strewn street. A rusted metal tab, carefully screwed down onto the Plexiglas, could be a metaphor for a fallen wing or the tarnished paradise in which the boy lives.

Curran’s technical wizardry, eccentric private vision and wide-open attitude toward experimentation give his work a freshness and freedom that calls up the spirit of the early 19th-Century pioneers of photography, in whose memory the exhibition was organized.

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