After my second visit to Focus-Pocus: Fact & Fiction in Contemporary Photography at The Beaker Gallery, I found myself conjuring up all sorts of wondrous synonyms and connotations for the show's title. Deception, trickery, artifice, hoax, ruse, sleight of hand, and, well, you get the picture. Which leads me to the real subject at hand: Photographs that speak to us with a whispered subtext. By this I mean hidden messages or altered realities that are not grasped at first glance.
And is fact actually reality, as the exhibition title implies? It's an important question in an era of digitalization and "reality TV," where we've learned that fact and reality are not necessarily the same.
Focus-Pocus, now in its last week at The Beaker Gallery in downtown Tampa, is a thoughtful, well-curated exhibition featuring 11 photographers, many of whom are international artists, and all of whom use camera-based, artist-staged deceptions. Typically they either subvert reality by altering their subject matter or use ironic titles that automatically return our eye to the photo for clues. To the credit of artist/curator A. A. Rucci, most of the work is subtle in ways that are often aesthetically pleasing more often than not.
The exhibition isn't earth shaking in depth, but it is sophisticated in its questioning.
One way to decipher Focus-Pocus is to look for unifying elements in subject matter. Nature is at the top of the list, but these are hardly your typical landscape snapshots. All of them inject an artificial interruption of natural forces.
For example, Nancy Mladenoff's interest is the natural world, but her painted mushrooms photos often bestow a Disney-esque whimsy where we'd probably least like to see it. Yet, as much as I personally reject her artificial process, there's something oddly compelling here. One mushroom painted with the pattern and colors of a reptile is so realistic that it suggests genetic altering. So we look back twice, unsure of what we're actually seeing, thus fulfilling the exhibition premise of fact vs. fiction. Other mushroom images are strictly artifice with flat patterns of color, meandering Technicolor dots, or a pastel frosting-like coating. This last batch is an extension of the artist's long interest in children's illustrations. Ironically, her best image is of the undersides of mushrooms, and looks quite natural, almost elegiac.
Some of Dan Torop's photos also invoke nature, but they're more quiet studies than aesthetically appealing images. Still, some are intriguing. The best one here, with the most aesthetic interest, is of falling leaves in front of a house and porch. But close inspection reveals that the leaves are absolutely still and only appear to be falling. In another, three deer stop you in your tracks when you notice the skunk's tail on one (at least I think it's a skunk) and questions about reality pop into your mind. Also along these lines is his image of fireflies lighting up the night though the sky is not yet dark enough.
Penelope Umbrico's images of mirrors occasionally include leaves, which makes them a curious clash between nature and machine-made object. She's a fine artist with a proclivity for understated serene imagery.
A number of artists focus on the figure. Torop's "Birthday Party" looks more like the cluttered aftermath of a whiskey-guzzling guy party than what I think of as a birthday party. Yuri Maiorov, a star performer with Cirque du Soleil, exhibits a group of elegant black-and-white photos featuring performers posed in amazing positions with some staged to resemble dream-like sequences. These are quite striking, though their Baroque-like gilty frames are the one major misstep in a gallery devoted to contemporary art and extremely conscious of appearance (they arrived like that Rucci says).
Another photographer who uses his own figure and also invokes profundity is Argentinean artist Pablo Soria, now of Miami. I am extremely excited to become acquainted with his exceptional work, which occupies a small gallery area of its own within The Beaker Gallery's 6,000-square-foot space. Soria focuses on memories and personal history. The images here are of his own shadowy photographed figure collaged in the darkroom onto a background of paper squares with small crosses at the corners. Soria's double aura of mystery and wonderful aesthetic sensibility are memorable. Those familiar with the Starn twins will see some resemblance to their darkroom manipulation and light sources.
Another fine artist who fulfills the truth vs. fiction premise is Susanne Ramsenthaler, whose photographs of soap make it look astonishingly like food. Her work is minimal and elegant.
Miscellaneous subjects fill out the exhibition.
Ben Carillo's juxtaposition of grubby white bathtub and dirty grout against gold fixtures and a gold-framed glass shower enclosure are too much of a quick read. You get the contrast right away, and there are no further layers of meaning here to peel away.
Eugenia Vargas Pereira is represented by two photos from her series called The Longest Day of the Year. These represent part of a fairy tale about a doll and toy horse, but that interpretation remains elusive.
The Fact and Fiction exhibition is reminiscent of University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum's show UnNaturally (from last Spring), in which artists altered nature with artificial media or manipulated natural elements until they appeared artificial. Both of these smart shows explore the elusive boundaries between what we think is real and what is not. They demonstrate novel thematic directions within contemporary artistic thinking.
The Beaker Gallery opened last fall and is one of the most intelligent galleries in the Bay area. Focus-Pocus is one of their best shows.
Adrienne M. Golub can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
