Catherine Chalmers
Rob Ziebell

Two Photographers

DBERMAN GALLERY
AUSTIN

by Rebecca Cohen   
ARTL!ES
Summer 2001         

A review...

 
 


I love when art intrudes on life, muscling its way into quotidian events, conveying new significance to the status quo.  The other day I noticed what appeared to be a couple of twigs stuck to one side of our back door.  Upon closer inspection I discovered our ordinary portal had become the love nest for a pair of mating mantises.  I ran outside every 15 minutes for the next hour, hoping to be there for the main event.

My sudden attentiveness to the insect world is thanks to d berman Gallery's recent exhibition of color photographs by New York-based Catherine Chalmers.

Her 40-by-60 inch chromogenic prints turn the natural world upside down, causing human viewers to pause and reconsider.  We humans ordinarily pay no attention to nature's mating and eating games, but when they're presented hundreds of times life size on a gallery wall, as with the mantises, it's much easier to submit to prurient voyeurism than to turn away.  Chalmer's photographs both delight and, occasionally, repulse

The dramatic white backdrops Chalmers employs suggest a theatrical rather than natural setting, jarring the viewer even further, though the photographer explains that she is simply removing distractions.  Her graphic, theatrically scaled images are much more artful artifice than natural science.

Back to the mantises: when they finish copulating, Ms. Mantis eats her partner's face off, and then devours the rest of him.  While I missed the action outside my house, this sequence is shown explicitly in Sex (during) /Sex (after).  Chalmers has obtained and sheltered mantises, pinkies (baby mice), snakes, caterpillars, and frogs, photographing them as they eat, copulate, and die.  "My job is about 90 percent zookeeping and 10 percent photography," she says, adding that she does not harm her subjects, as some critics have suggested.  "I put my energy into raising animals, not hurting them."

I frankly doubt that there is a huge audience ready to live with nature so exploded in scale and isolated from context.  The rest of us can find Chalmer's "encounters between mates, predators, and prey” in Food Chain, a book published by Aperture.  The book’s images portray a brilliantly colored food chain: jade green caterpillars eating a juicy red tomato, praying mantis eating a caterpillar (revealing its juicy red guts), a tarantula eating a praying mantis, and ... well, you get the point.

Rob Ziebell, a photographer living in Castroville, Texas, offered somewhat more lyrical nature experiences as a counterpoint to Chalmers's nature studies.  If Chalmers uses living nature to go for the jugular, Ziebell concentrates on flora rather than fauna, juxtaposing vegetables and fruit against richly patterned backgrounds to create settings that are positively baroque.  His portraits are also displayed much larger than life, in 20by-24 inch and 30-by-40 inch prints; sometimes he carves or cuts his subjects, or arranges them -in positions that suggest they are doing more than waiting to become breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Of particular poignancy to me were twin peas in a huge, single pod presented vertically against a particularly lush floral print background.  This particular Fuji Supergloss Print inspired me (the mother of identical twins girls) to return for second and third looks.

In fact, all of Ziebell's color-drenched photos reward close consideration.  They glow with a mysterious light that uncannily highlights their central images with an otherworldly flame that shines from within.  Hardly natures morts, his garishly colored arrangements throb with life, albeit life that appears alien in origin.  Perhaps this facility with lighting can be traced to Ziebell's experience as a filmmaker (his feature length film, This State I’m In, has been screened at numerous museums and on Houston’s PBS affiliate).  In any case, his fruity and veggie "actors and actresses" certainly suggest characters eager to stand center stage and sing.

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