"Gateway" by Fred Zafran, part of Multiple Exposures Gallery’s Reflection Unknown
Ongoing: Reflection Unknown by Fred Zafran at Multiple Exposures Gallery
Fred Zafran acknowledges that his current one-person exhibit at Multiple Exposures Gallery is an “unusual” one. It’s an “allegory of doubt and inquiry,” he says, in which the works should be “considered symbolically or metaphorically.” Not surprisingly, Zafran’s photographs—a mixture of natural scenes and portraits of anonymous figures—are pensive and moody. In fact, Zafran’s works are intensely personal to the point of opacity, with brief titles like “Beckoning,” “Deepening,” and “Far Beyond,” explaining little. Fortunately, their visual vocabulary makes many of Zafran’s photographs compelling. One image of sky reflected in water is pleasingly multilayered, with a water surface splotchy with algae yet coexisting with a dreamy cloud-and-branch-dappled sky. In another, fog swirling within a brambly forest tricks the eye into wondering whether one is looking straight ahead or straight down; in a third, lily pads in bright sunlight take on an unusual, ghostly yet reflective sheen, sharply contrasting with an impenetrably inky aquatic backdrop. If one image successfully marries the natural and the human worlds, it’s “Presence,” in which a man sits, trancelike, on a park bench as tendrils of water dance from a nearby fountain; the image presents a concise embodiment of the yin-yang of motion and stasis. Reflection Unknown runs through Nov. 19 at Multiple Exposures Gallery at the Torpedo Factory Art Center, 105 N Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com. Free. —Louis Jacobson