ART / Cathy Curtis : Martha Fuller Says Her Piece in Combinations

Most people who claim they aren’t technically oriented don’t get seriously involved in photography. But Martha Fuller enjoys the medium precisely because, she says, “I realized I could do whatever I wanted to do--mash all the chemicals together or change the light. . . .”

One of her manipulated images, “State of Grace,” is in the Newport Harbor Art Museum exhibit “Photographs From the Permanent Collection,” along with work by such prominent California photographers as Lewis Baltz and John Divola. The show opens Friday.

Fuller, 40, came to photography after traveling around the United States and Canada judging horses. In an interview recently at her ocean-view Laguna Beach home, she described that life as “being on the move, living in funky hotels with every strata of society, from the top end to the lowest groom.”

When she moved to California from Toronto in 1985, Fuller said, she felt a freedom to do what she wanted, away from “support systems and expectations” of her past. At the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach--where she had planned to study painting and drawing--she became captivated by “the portability and adventure” of photography.

She later enrolled in the graduate studio art program at Cal State Fullerton without realizing that there were two prominent photographers on the faculty: Eileen Cowin--whose meticulously staged “docudramas” in Cibachrome are included in the Newport Harbor show--and Darryl Curran.

“Eileen was not on the same wavelength as me,” Fuller said candidly. “I knew in a matter of months that spending hours sketching a pose (for a photograph) was not what I wanted.”

But Curran--whose work incorporates unusual juxtapositions and superimpositions of images--was “sort of intuitively my mentor from the beginning,” Fuller said. “His influence was more his presence” than any explicit instruction, she said. “For me, the less interference I have, the more I work, the more I’m challenged. He was always encouraging me. . . .”

Fuller doesn’t like what she calls the “rigid” aspects of photography--its standard rectangular format and flat surface--so she tries to subvert them in various ways. Most of this legerdemain goes on in the darkroom. She combines various images, manipulates a print so that its edges resemble a spill of liquid, or “draws” on the film with a penlight.

The drawing “is the biggest magic of all,” she said. “I never know till it’s finished and starts to revert back to a silvery color what it will look like.”

“State of Grace,” in the Newport Harbor exhibit, is the result of projecting several slides on top of one another, allowing the sandwich of disparate images to be the subject of the work. Views of old men she saw on a trip to Nepal are juxtaposed with a shot of African children pushing against the window of her car (“a really painful image in its original form”) and an abstract image taken at home.

The semi-veiled imagery that results suggests to Fuller the curiously selective process of memory as well as the gap between what the eye sees and what the camera records. Images “combine that you’d never think of combining, and they suggest something different in combination,” she said. Still, she adds, the resulting photograph “has to be something that’s not so dense it’s confusing.”

Travel to Third World countries is Fuller’s way of recapturing some of the nomadic qualities of her previous career. She intended no political or social meaning in the piece, she said, adding, “I don’t know how an artist could be effective in terms of political things.”

Another work that resulted from the Nepal trip is a photo-triptych in which Fuller’s own image gradually merges with the figures of two men--one in traditional dress except for his Nike running shoes--in a Katmandu street.

“My interest was in making a self-portrait and in how I was becoming part of the culture,” she said. “I’m aware of seeing what I see from my (American tourist’s) side of the street. . . . I certainly try to immerse myself as much as I can . . . but I’m still an observer.”

Her primary interest as a traveler is, she said, in “the similarities and differences we all share--religions, superstitions, rites of passages.” She has produced two deliberately “intuitive,” unstructured, one-of-a-kind books of images culled from her journeys.

Oddly enough, however, one subject that absolutely does not interest her as a photographer is the equestrian world of her past.

“It’s so familiar to me, I didn’t think it would teach me anything,” she said. “The less I know, the more intrigued I am.”

The honor of having work in the Newport Harbor permanent collection is unusual for someone fresh out of graduate school--Fuller received her master’s degree last spring from Cal State Fullerton--but there was a mitigating circumstance. Her work was one of two pieces by Cal State Fullerton studio-art graduate students purchased by the Special Collection Program of the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles.

Fuller’s piece was selected by foundation director Henry Hopkins, Newport Harbor director Kevin Consey and by Jerry Samuelson, dean of the university’s school of arts, and donated to the museum. (The other piece, a blown-glass sculpture by Jeanie and Rolph Wald, was given to the university.)

“Fullerton means a great deal to me because it was my home more than 40 years ago,” Weisman said. Weisman is president and chief executive officer the Frederick Weisman Co. in Maryland and is the founder of the art collection that bears his name. Weisman is well known for his active interest in new artists.

Weisman said he intends the Cal State Fullerton project to be the first of several purchase-and-donate programs at universities across the country.

“Photographs From the Permanent Collection” opens Friday at Newport Harbor Art Museum and will remain on view through Sept. 24. The museum is at 850 San Clemente Drive in Newport Beach and is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Admission is $3 general, $2 for students and seniors, $1 for children 6 to 17. Information: (714) 759-1122.