Exhibit Review by Mark Jenkins
The title of Multiple Exposures Gallery’s “14 Visions” emphasizes the 14 contributors’ individuality. Yet many of the photographs selected by curator Allison Nance dovetail neatly. While half are in black-and-white and half in color, the latter pictures are usually muted and sometimes nearly monochromatic. Stacy Smith Evans’s mountain panorama is mostly blue with splashes of yellow sunlight, and Francine B. Livaditis’s study of a Frank Gehry building is predominantly silvery. The near-abstract elements of Maureen Minehan’s elegant close-up of a boat and its tether are black and cream, framed by a luminous expanse of light-green water.
The greens are stronger in Irina Dakhnovskaia-Lawton’s picture of a woman who poses next to a painted portrait, but the hues are cool and their range narrow. One of the show’s few touches of red is the illuminated stop sign suspended high above an intersection in Fred Zafran’s round-midnight shot of a Tokyo back street. And while that photo is unusually colorful, compositionally it fits well with a half dozen others that feature rectangles of light within overwhelming darkness.
Two of the most effective of these pictures are by Tim Hyde and David Myers. The first peers through a door frame into a shadowy room to spy a partly illuminated patch of bed; the second gazes out, past a bed frame in a near-black chamber, to reveal a window that admits light but no sense of what’s beyond. If the sense of isolation in such scenes is suffocating, Van Pulley’s nighttime moment is more expansive. His photo captures a steel-gray sky split by a ribbon of stars that are also reflected in still water below. The composition evocatively juxtaposes light and dark, openness and confinement.
