ART REVIEWS : ‘Naturalist’: Engaging Look at Our World

Approximately 540 photographs, postcards, photocopies, film stills, newspaper clips, magazine pages, cookbook illustrations, travel book excerpts and offset prints, among many other kinds of reproductions, cover the walls of Thomas Solomon’s Garage. Installed in a wide band that wraps around 10 walls on two floors, “The Naturalist Gathers” is one of the most engaging exhibitions of the summer.

It represents only a small portion of the pictures collected by New York-based critic and curator Douglas Blau since his childhood. The show is a generous, intelligent and memorable exploration of what it means to look and to think--to reflect upon the various ways we arrange the profusion of materials that make up our surroundings into meaningful, coherent groups. Blau’s desire for some kind of structure is not an inflexible demand for abstract categorization. Instead, at the root of his wide-ranging activities as a collector is the importance of pleasure.

Themes organize different walls. On one, isolated individuals are engrossed in activities that require their utmost concentration. Reproductions of art historical masterpieces of children blowing soap bubbles, a postcard of a man counting radishes, National Geographic-style photos of scientists peering through microscopes, and a newspaper clip of a welder at work suggest that what unites divergent activities is the mode of attention its participants bring to them. In Blau’s radically catholic approach to media and genres, traditional distinctions among materials are less important than the ideas pictured by them.

Another wall consists of groups of artists, cooks, scholars, doctors, monks and scientists, all pursuing their specialized endeavors. Other walls show natural history museums, private collections, libraries, greenhouses and other vast storehouses of artifacts. By calling these places to mind, the exhibition emphasizes that what sometimes happens in art galleries can also take place in restaurants, laboratories, hospitals, classrooms and private homes. “The Naturalist Gathers” contends that art has no monopoly on careful looking, focused attention and self-conscious thinking, but that all belong to a world in which these activities happen naturally.

From the refinements of beautifully arranged still-lifes to the sometimes more rudimentary satisfactions of a well-cooked meal, and from the esoteric pursuits of highly specialized scientists to Andy Warhol’s fascination with uncommon cookie jars, visual delectation gives Blau’s open-ended project its defining impetus and energy.

His own obsession with the arrangement, presentation and ordering of the very stuff of life always takes the viewer back to a healthy curiosity about the world. Blau’s unquenchable thirst for insights and interconnections results in strange but compelling parallels, found in diverse spheres and pursuits. These discoveries confirm that no single model of knowledge is adequate to the world’s rampant, befuddling, often unfathomable diversity. According to Blau’s exhibition, flexibility, fluidity and, above all else, hands-on engagement are essential to our search for satisfaction in art and in life.

Wandering around “The Naturalist Gathers” is like getting lost in your favorite bookstore. The only difference is that you don’t need to bother with words. It is as if Blau has summarized, condensed and translated ideas spanning medieval religion, Renaissance philosophy, modern science and contemporary art into a panoply of complex pictures. Laid out for you to peruse at your own pace, they constitute a constellation that draws you back again and again, always to see some relationship or variation you previously missed.

Almost all of Blau’s small, matter-of-fact reproductions are packed with enough details to occupy one’s mind and eyes for a duration that exceeds the length of the normal gallery visit. Hung together, they orchestrate an incredibly rich study of what we do when we look at art.

Thomas Solomon’s Garage, 928 N . Fairfax Ave., (213) 654-4731, through Aug. 23. Closed Mondays.

Balancing Act: Ruth Thorne-Thomsen’s little photographs at Jan Kesner Gallery combine the scale of vast landscapes with the hands-on intimacy of still-lifes. Collectively titled “Songs of the Sea,” they balance an impulse toward romance, wistfulness and melancholia against an equally powerful pull toward silliness.

When they hold these contradictory tendencies together, they glimpse a fantastic, dreamy world that is as unforgettable as it is elusive. When the panoramic fails to fuse with the miniature, they are merely cute.

Made with a pinhole camera and contact-printed from 4-by-5-inch paper negatives, Thorne-Thomsen’s softly lit pictures are framed by wide black bands. These solid borders function like the frame of a window. They add to the illusion that the image they contain opens onto a haunted, mist-filled space, one that shares the boundaries of the natural world, extending as far back as the Earth’s horizon.

To make her photographs, Thorne-Thomsen arranges mini-dioramas with Greek and Roman statuettes, small rocks, pebbles and twigs, as well as tiny models of ancient columns, buildings and ships. Her uncluttered compositions are at times elegant. More often, a sense of casual randomness organizes their formal components.

In contrast to many other contemporary photographers who use common toys and cheap props to explore the nature of illusionism, Thorne-Thomsen explores illusionism that is intrinsic to nature. She stages her miniature scenarios in the shallow waters of an unusually calm lake in the hinterlands of Wisconsin. Its mist-covered, mirror-smooth surface provides a perfect setting for her artfully nuanced manipulations of light and space.

Rather than offering her viewers a totally controlled, studio-produced surrogate for nature--and, by implication, for reality--the 49-year-old, Philadelphia-based photographer collaborates with nature’s own capacity to deceive. In her images, radical shifts in scale belong equally to art’s artificial constructions, such as collage, and to reality’s ongoing processes, such as optical illusions, mirages, watery reflections and banks of fog.

The camera, her art argues, depicts neither the simple truth of the real world nor a set of elaborate lies magically grafted onto some distant, unrepresentable bedrock. Without the bathetic posturing or overblown arrogance of theory-laden, photo-based Conceptualism, Thorne-Thomsen presents a measured, intelligent argument for the mutual dependence and interplay between appearance and reality.

Her imaginary landscapes are both primordial in their simplicity and futuristic in the explicitness of their fakery. They quietly invite one-on-one encounters in which distinctions between nature and culture have broken down, and meaning has not yet been fully formed. Understated to the point of self-effacement, Thorne-Thomsen’s photographs draw you into their orbit and then recede. They become tiny backdrops for large dramas with the potential to continually unfold.

* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through Aug. 29. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

FO “Parable,” by Ruth Thorne-Thomsen: Balancing an impulse toward romance, wistfulness and melancholia against a pull toward silliness.