ART REVIEWS

Demonic Mnemonics: Photographer Jo Ann Callis moves into new territory with “Mnemonic Pictures,” a body of new work that pairs photography with a series of 16 sculptures. Callis has been fabricating objects to be photographed for a while now, and her objects have finally developed to the point that they’ve established a life independent of the photos--in fact, they’ve grown to the point that they upstage the photos on view here.

Callis has a very strange sculptural sensibility. Marrying industrial and organic forms, these mid-size works have a monumentality evocative of Henry Moore (Moore is evoked in the curving forms and sense of weight), yet they’re ephemeral, surreal and oddly silly. A mnemonic is a device or technique for improving the memory, and these weird gray forms (made of wood, plaster and tinted wax) prod the memory in a peculiarly irritating way. They all look as though they’re almost some definable thing--a piece of furniture or a body part--yet they keep one foot firmly planted in the realm of abstraction. They remind you of something but it’s impossible to say exactly what, and thus they thwart the mechanism of memory.

On view in an adjoining gallery are nine photographed still lifes--of eggs, a bird cage, furniture, a toy dog--that feel like images from a dream. Callis overexposes the forms in these pictures to the point that the details are completely blown out, and they read as flat, white shapes; what she seems to be attempting with these painterly, theatrical pictures is to transport photography from the real world where it customarily resides, into the realm of the imagination.