Still Life in Action

On the face of it, photographer Charles Spink is tilling some conventional, time-honored artistic soil in his images on view at the Atget Gallery.

These are still-life subjects, after all, with objects placed in a controlled indoor setting, ripe for the patient observation of the artist.

The artist then considers the composition and the material nature of the image created, and, accordingly, expresses something personal. Voila: Still life in action.

But things are always at least a bit askew in Spink’s odd world, and conventions are thrown into a gently subversive tailspin. The dreamy machination of surrealism rears its head, in different ways and with different intensities.

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Ashovel head is mated with a hairpiece-like tangle of plant roots--the target of the tool’s attacks becomes part of its being.

In the most double-take worthy piece, “Hanging Table,” a Dali-esque spatial conundrum greets the eye. We find a table hanging from the ceiling on its side, with a foot emerging from the table as if it is Alice’s foot stepping through to another plane in some psychedelic wonderland.

In an untitled piece, a tiny birdhouse dangles, ominously, over a huge, thorny tumbleweed set on the table.

Some deadpan reference to Wild West lore emerges, through the filter of an artist’s reinventive mind’s eye.

The Ventura-based Spink has shown his work in teasing doses around the county and beyond, including several pieces in the 1996 “Assembly of the Arts” show at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art. Seeing a concentrated selection of pieces in one gallery, though, affords us a more in-depth look at what makes him tick, aesthetically.

The show’s title, “Photographs from the Interior,” contains an apt multiple meaning, referring to the interior of the studio itself into which the objects have been placed, but also to the mental interior of expectations and perception that the imagery toys with.

Another implicit connection has to do with Spink’s introduction of elements from nature, from the external world, such as a half-faked “tree” of twigs stuck in a hunk of soil with a cross-beam on top.

In “Salt,” a teeming mound of the white stuff is piled high, dramatically lit from the side to imply some holy countenance.

The perception game starts with the studio setting itself.

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Its rumpled sheets as backdrops and visible table surfaces suggest a space just funky and makeshift enough to create a weird, hermetic, back-room theatricality. Placing things on tables for observation is a practice evocative of scientific or artistic inquiry, anyway, and Spink plays up the analytical aspect of the set-up.

At times, the set-ups revolve around art in-jokes.

The self-explanatory subject of “Needle” hangs by a thread in the middle of a round painting frame, also suspended in the studio (suspension of reality, and disbelief, are tacit themes here). Layers of reality are inverted, as if by dream logic.

All these ploys might stretch the boundaries of artistic subtlety if it weren’t for Spink’s careful attention to detail, lighting, craft and inference.

He creates a curious but also compelling world within the world we know, using elements from the known natural and cultural world, but takes them out of context and shoehorns them into a context that he is making up as he goes along.

That’s a worthwhile work-in-progress.

DETAILS

Charles Spink, “Photographs from the Interior,” through May 15 at the Atget Gallery, 1484 E. Main St. in Ventura. Gallery hours: Tues.-Fri. 10 a.m.-noon and 1-6 p.m.; Sat. 10 a.m.-4 p.m.; 652-1122.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.