At the Griffin: ‘Solstice’ observed; dreamscapes; a show of hands
WINCHESTER — Think of the figure in the foreground of Jim Fesler’s very handsome photograph “Thresholds” as a surrogate for visitors to the Griffin Museum of Photography’s “Winter Solstice 2023.”
The exhibition runs through Jan. 7, as do Xuan-Hui Ng’s “Transcendence: Awakening the Soul” and Bill Chapman’s contribution to the museum’s ongoing “Illuminating the Archive” series.
A young person stands poised before a series of archways and entrances. The series doesn’t recede into infinity, but it’s certainly extensive. So, too, with “Winter Solstice”: It includes just under 300 photographs, as well as a video, by Bai Song, and a photographically adorned cigar box, by Sally Chapman. None of the photographs are framed or matted, which helps make such a large number seem more inviting than imposing.
The annual show consists of a single work each submitted by Griffin members. It’s the same organizing principle as the Photographic Resource Center’s “Your Work Here.” That show runs through Jan. 20. Nearly two dozen photographers have work in both.
Part of the interest of such shows is to see what patterns or recurrences, if any, might emerge: of style, subject, format, scale, you name it. As regards subjects, there several you would likely expect: animals, landscape, weather, and nature generally. Bremner Benedict’s “Wall Springs, Smoke Creek Desert, NV” evinces the sere beauty of its title. The rain in Cynthia W. Smith’s “North Country Traveler” is surely something not often seen in the Smoke Creek Desert. The raindrops on the lens of Smith’s camera both emphasizes the meteorological situation and gives the image a misterioso visual texture.
Textures matter a lot with the most surprising aspect of the show: how painterly many of the photographs are. Again and again, one sees a picture that at first glance looks like a painting, etching, or watercolor. Although Sue Michlovitz’s “Aqua Muse III” is a standard archival inkjet print, it has a textural softness and glow that make it seem to belong to its own medium of one.
Sometimes painterliness is a matter of materials. Valerie Burke’s “Thistles and Grass’’ incorporates pastels. Joseph Lieber’s “inside out” and Lisa Cohen’s “Kathe Fleeing” both use encaustic. Kerry Sharkey-Miller’s “Something in the Air” adds acrylic to photogravure, and Martha Wakefield’s “Storm Cloud Over Pink House” (speaking of weather) employs watercolor.
(As regards thinking pink, Frank Armstrong’s “Natural Bridge, Virginia” is symphonic rather than painterly, the symphony consisting of the color in question.)
Sometimes the painterliness extends to title as well as appearance, as with Judith Montminy’s “Mondrian Underfoot,” or, for lack of a better word, kinship. Yorgos Efthymiadis’s “Net” does for tennis what David Hockney’s pool paintings do for swimming.
Montminy’s witty title is an example of the humor to be found in “Solstice.” Skip Smith’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” is striking visually, showing a set of clothespins on an empty line, and very amusing as title. Charles Ford’s “Window Shopping in Milan” is all the funnier for being seen at this gift-giving season. The comedy in Marianne McCoy’s “Mid-Century Modern” comes from what we’re seeing not being on the level — literally. The angling of the storefront offers a pleasing deadpan eccentricity. As for the juxtaposition of hot-air balloons overhead and parking lot below in Mark Levinson’s “Fantasy Morning Commute,” it’s slyly comic, the comicality aided and abetted by the title.
A different sort of juxtaposing occurs throughout “Solstice,” which is one of the pleasures a show with so many works has to offer: the contrast between images. The lucent, near-Euclidean clarity of Anderson Clark’s “Dolphin Dreams” (oh, that ocean light) could hardly differ more from the moody, immanent illumination of Jim Hill’s “Post Office 60938.” Each photograph is striking. Taken together, they become all the more so.
Perception is a complicated word. It can refer to the physical act of seeing: sight. It can also refer to the figurative act of seeing: insight. Xuan-Hui Ng draws on both meanings for “Transcendence: Awakening the Soul.”
These 12 photographs and a video record her “encounters with the natural world,” she writes, in several settings in Japan. More than record, though, they “celebrate and eternalize” them. These works are as much dreamscapes as landscapes — maybe even more — with physical documentation very much subsidiary to spiritual expression. The images are undeniably, even ravishingly, beautiful. But they’re also possessed of an inwardness that verges on the hermetic.
Bill Chapman’s approach in “Illuminating the Archive” could hardly differ more. Ng wants to take us inside. Chapman stays outside. That’s where the camera functions most rewardingly: reacting, recording, reveling in what it sees.
The “Archive” series tasks a contemporary photographer with entering into a visual dialogue with the work of the museum’s founder, the photojournalist Arthur Griffin. This Chapman’s eight photographs do, and perhaps more successfully than any previous participant has done. His naturally lively and attentive sensibility is doubly attentive here: both to what’s in front of his camera and to each Griffin photograph his own is conversing with.
Not that that’s necessarily the only conversing going on. Notice how the hands of the little girl in the foreground of Chapman’s photo of the King Memorial on the Common are carrying on what one might call a visual conversation of their own with the pair of monumental hands behind her. The difference in scale makes it all the more engaging.
Note: Ng’s show will move to the Griffin’s @WinCam space, 32 Swanton St., Winchester, running Jan. 15-March 4.