The Boston Herald
Friday, June 7, 2002
Photo exhibit makes you feel at `Home'
Visual Arts/by Joanne Silver
Two yellow apples sit on a white serving platter like twin suns
in a formless cosmos. One is puckering inside plastic wrap. The
other, less wilted, remains unshrouded. This color photograph,
``Preservation II'' by Sonia Targontsidis, records an incidental
moment in the life of the artist's family. Along with glimpses
of her brother wrapping a present, her mother opening the front
door to the morning sun, and her father caught in the glare of
a light bulb, the view of apples helps flesh out Targontsidis'
photographic portrait of home.
Her home has little - and everything - in common with the other
domestic spaces in ``Almost Home,'' at Brockton's Fuller Museum
of Art through Sept. 8. Despite a variety of cultures and aesthetics,
the 10 emerging artists selected for this evocative exhibition
all address one of the universal features of human existence.
Humble or lavish, comforting or troubled, home looms large in
the imagination. Even those photographers who focus only on a
water-stained corner of ceiling, a kitchen window shade or a stray
sock are excavating charged terrain.
``Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?'' the poet
Elizabeth Bishop once wrote. This exhibition suggests that both
inquiries continue forever as questions - since it is impossible
to leave home completely, and just as difficult to pinpoint its
location. Morgan Cohen tries. His lush color
photos capture the surprising sensuality of a silver drain tucked
into a curve of pale pink porcelain, the atmospheric orange of
a room's corner by lamplight, the dappled traces of water seeping
through a ceiling's edge.
Davis Bliss' untitled color prints from her ``Domestic Debris''
series zero in on the flotsam and jetsam of daily living and,
by extension, on the unseen people who have left flowered underwear
on the floor and an empty shampoo bottle floating in the tub.
Only objects inhabit Neeta Madahar's photographs of her apartment
and her parents' home in England, but these, too, are animated
by beings beyond the photographic frame.
``Couch I,'' one of the most compelling shots in the show, reveals
just the midsection of the piece of furniture, where cushions
of maize brocade don't quite line up. Lurking within the sunlit
upholstery are reminders of the relationships that become inextricably
woven into the objects from home.
A mysterious sliver of daylight lands on a well-worn staircase
in one of Monique Deschaines' untitled prints. As elusive and
potent as memory, the wedge of light asserts its physical presence
as part of this scene. Tanja Alexia Hollander lingers on those
places where realms meet: rain-spattered panes of glass, gauzy
curtains, window screens made uneven by age.
In these boundaries between inside and out, private and public,
darkness and light, the artist has found a perfect symbol for
the process of looking. Yearning permeates Hollander's images,
but it is not the contrived longing of nostalgia. Her close-up
views of a screen's wire mesh or droplets on glass suggest vast
unexplored reaches - in both the physical and the emotional landscape.
With the aid of a pinhole camera's long exposure, Ri Anderson
documents herself in places that served as temporary homes as
she traveled through South India. ``Rice Boat, Kerala Backwaters''
transforms a bedroom scene into a floating world, framed by woven
rattan, where human bodies are no more substantial than the dizzying
sunlight beyond a cotton curtain.
Lalla Essaydi's quasi-autobiographical photographs cross a threshold
into territory at once alluring and repulsive, exotic and far
too familiar to the artist. Nude women, whose bodies are covered
with Arabic text written in henna, drift anonymously through the
tiled and patterned rooms of a Moroccan house. As they penetrate
this interior - of an actual house where Essaydi's Muslim family
would send disobedient females - these inscribed figures blend
in with the architecture and challenge it.
Jennifer Kodis and Kara McElhone take a more detached view of
the notion of home, investigating the myths of suburbia from the
exterior. Kodis' untitled black-and-white images tend toward the
cliched, but she has created a powerful monolith in one photograph
of the side of a house, vinyl-covered and interrupted only by
a single window and the cold gaze of a satellite dish.
Without their titles, McElhones' color pictures would be little
more than portraits of ordinary houses. By adding such identifiers
as ``Vacant House, Dead Body Found'' and other bits of history
and rumor surrounding these dwellings, the artist forces an emotional
involvement on the part of the viewer. And what is home, after
all, but a place that takes hold of the imagination and doesn't
let go?
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Also at the Fuller: ``Along the Right of Way: Landscapes From
a Train'' chronicles Rodger Kingston's 27-year photographic journey
as seen from the window of an Amtrak train. Cities and swamps,
fellow riders and those waiting on platforms surface in this lushly
colored portrait of America.