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Visionary
Landscapes: by
Ben Wilcott |
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D Berman Gallery, through Feb 24 Looking at Corrine Dune's photographs at D Berman Gallery, you feel as though you were looking at the land that time forgot. Her stark desert landscapes are perfectly still; there are no people, no animals, no signs of life. It is as if she packed up her camera and headed out in search of the ancient, undiscovered corners of the world. In fact, many of her photographs are images of much-visited Mayan ruins and national parks in Central and Northern Mexico. Which makes the effect of her work even more interesting: She seems to magically strip away the messy fingerprints of human presence and uncover the timeless essence of the land. Dune, who studied in her
native France with Ann Cartier-Bresson and
now lives in Austin, achieves this through
her variation of an early photographic
technique. She makes her own pinhole cameras
out of metal cans and cookie
tins, exposes the film slowly over
several minutes, then develops the film on
handmade paper. She also experiments with
emulsions, frequently using tones that echo
the colors of the landscape: red earth, gray
rock, brown shrubbery. This careful,
hands-on approach results in unique images
of subtle beauty that employ a different
vocabulary than conventional photography.
Instead of precise or manipulated, Dune's images have a soft, muted
quality somewhere between glossy and flat.
At times, her works do not look like photographs
at all: Images of temple ruins take on the
grainy texture of a video still, a sky seems
almost painted, a series of agave trees
pulled from their landscapes stand in bold
relief to their background like woodblock prints
on canvas. D Berman has hung the photos in distinct color groups -- gray-toned works, red-toned works, brown-toned works -- which move in a continuum from the more purely representational to the near abstract. By refining a few basic elements, Dune achieves endless textural variations. In fact, the final piece of the exhibit is barely recognizable as the work of the same artist who created the first. Her photographs have one thing in common, however: They emanate an electricity. They seem to come from a state of heightened awareness urging us to see things we normally would miss for what they truly are. Dune shares the exhibition
with artist Ann Matlock, whose landscapes
also play with variations on tradition.
Matlock, however, is a weaver, who combines
tapestry techniques with her own method of brocade
stitching. It is a style as much as a
technique and her images strike several different chords at once --
elegant and folksy, contemporary and craftlike,
complex and homemade. Some of the works are
fairly straightforward representations of
the Hill Country surrounding her studio,
which she likes to paint as a way to begin
working on a piece. Other landscapes,
however, self-referentially play with the idea of tapestry
itself: Stepping back, you can imagine the
fabric stretched across the frame suddenly
enlarged, hanging from the wall of some
regal drawing room a century
or two ago. Like Dune's photographs, Matlock's
weavings show a painter's attention to
color. The golds, reds, greens, and browns flow
very naturally from her watercolors (a few of
which are on display as part of the exhibition).
That is where the similarities end, but each
has created some of the most unusual,
memorable landscapes you are likely to
see.-- |
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