Photographers’ Development : ‘SWALLOW’ Proves a Meaningful Feast

As an artist, Suvan Geer is not one to let her work blab noisily and indiscriminately to every passerby. Her installations involve the viewer in teasing out the deeper meaning of small gestures.

In “SWALLOW, Tales from the dinner table”--a piece installed in the storefront between Elements and the Improv comedy club at the Irvine Marketplace, the mall across from UC Irvine--Geer addresses emotional social issues without ever raising her voice.

Images of motherhood, nurturing and mistreatment mingle and build slowly in this piece, which consists of brief, first-person texts and a few spare images (cracked, fire-blackened eggshells; the silhouette of a tied-up animal, outlined in powdered milk).

Most of the texts are printed on the pages of open books. The documentary effect they create is muted by the soft, white substance (like Christmas tree flocking) that coats the pages. It gives the piece a spectral presence, underlining the theme of memory that bobs quietly below the ostensible subjects of the piece.

The first speaker, scrutinizing grains of spilled puffed rice, remarks that “each one was beautiful, a spongy white little ovum. . . .” The second recounts his or her mother’s seeming paranoia about being tied up and locked in at her rest home, where she has been tied down to be force-fed.

Two historical voices follow. One congratulates himself on feeding and teaching a slave’s child after the mother died. The other (a Victorian policeman?) sounds a self-congratulatory note for force-feeding a suffragette (“some child’s mother”) even though she is “such a poor specimen of womanhood.”

The final two voices belong to people who recall having been rewarded as children with sweets for doing certain odd but seemingly innocent things to please adult caretakers.

Food emerges in this piece as the complex thing it is, a basic human requirement that connects child to mother from the beginning and can serve as an instrument of power in any situation of dependency. While the historical voices give the reader an easy feeling of superiority, the same impulses live on in other forms and are just as easily rationalized.

At first glance, the elliptical quality of “SWALLOW” seems threatened by an overwrought poem (“Child, my love for you is so deep it bleeds from me . . .”) that supposedly represents the message someone’s mother left for her on the dining room table. But the baroque language reflects the passions at issue in this deceptively dense and resonant work.

* “SWALLOW, Tales from the dinner table,” through Jan. 31 at Satellite Storefront Studio, University Center, Campus Road at Bridge Road, Irvine. Hours: continuous. Free. (714) 724-6880.