"We are all Relative…" A Visual Exploration of Realities is an exhibition of photographs culled from the permanent collection of the Institute of American Indian Arts. The small exhibition features work by more than thirty photographers-IAIA students, established artists, and professional photographers on assignment-and incorporates a variety of media and themes that show a wealth of creative work by Native photographers in the past thirty years.

Linda Madison's (Nez Perce) "Blue Man Series I-IV," 1995, is the standout in this exhibition. Wisely, IAIA has benches in this gallery (many of the prints are hung somewhat low, salon-style), and I sat staring at these four enigmatic cyanotype portraits trying to discern exactly what it was about them that made them so compelling. Three of the four images are rendered in the slightly soft focus we associate with memory; the 19th-century cyanotype process also has a tendency to soften edges and the blue coloring somehow appears nostalgic. They are elegiac images, close-up portraits of unidentified men that aren't specific to any particular time or place. The faces thus become archetypes, hauntingly familiar visages of people you think you have known.

Some of the more well-known names included in the exhibition are James Luna (Diegueño/ Luiseño), Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Navajo/ Creek/ Seminole), an IAIA alumna; and Zig Jackson (Mandan/ Hidatsat/ Arikara), a UNM alumnus. Luna's "Half Indian/ Half Mexican" is a wryly perceptive triptych addressing stereotypes of identity and representation. Luna presents himself in profile from the right as an "Indian" with long hair, from the left as a "Mexican" with short hair and a mustache, and frontally as both, a twist on the old circus hermaphrodite routine of a performer groomed as a woman on one side and a man on the other. It is a simple, effective piece precisely because the visual referents are so familiar that the viewer must stop and think about his or her own perceptions and assumptions.

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie's collaborative images with Celia Rodriguez from the series "From What Part Indian Am I-Alter [sic] to Three Sisters," 1994, also address issues of representation and colonization. The three prints "Neocolonialism," "Colonialismo," and "Antes de Colon" depict a woman wearing a white embroidered cotton dress enacting vague rituals that are reminiscent of early tourist images of native women. Each image is printed lightly and the figure is outlined in heavy black marker, rendering the photographs almost as animated cartoon images, thus effectively skewering the myths and suggesting that they are more fiction than reality. Zig Jackson's 'Intrusions," 1988, addresses the selling of native culture as a popular amusement. The densely layered, warm-toned Van dyke print of tourists crawling around ruins while five Pre-Columbian masks float overhead is silently scornful.

Among the "trusted individuals," non-Native photographers who are welcomed to photograph in Native communities, is Laura Gilpin. Her "Navajo Women Casting Their First Vote" from 1955, an image that ordinarily would evoke a sense of pride at the remembrance of an essential hard-won right, is ironically poignant given the blatant disenfranchisement of Florida's voters of color in the recent presidential election.

Most of the images in a straighter, more documentary style occupy the hallway outside of the gallery. One notable exception is Roberta Archuleta's (Taos/Santa Ana Pueblo) "The Shawl," 1998, a small, striking portrait reminiscent of Caravaggio's "Bacchus." This image is reproduced on the exhibition handout, which features a text by curator Tom Fields (Cherokee/Creek). I picked up the handout before going through the show and expected this image to be much larger-it would certainly hold up, if not benefit from, being printed on a much larger scale.

Interestingly, Fields' selection does not include work from the 1960s (except for one Laura Gilpin image from 1960), the decade highlighted in the concurrent museum exhibition "IAIA rocks the 60s." On the one hand, that is probably good, preventing the photography exhibition from seeming like a photographic document of that period; on the other hand, the scope could have easily been narrowed to highlight the 1980s and 1990s as an equivalent "explosion of creative genius" by Native artists in the medium of photography.

                         

Ordinarily, if I hear an artist speak about "otherworldliness" and "mystery" in reference to his or her work a red flag goes up because there is rarely ever true mystery in a photographic image. But Gregory Crewdson is no ordinary photographer, and these large-scale cinematic photographs at SITE Santa Fe are indeed mysterious and otherworldly images. They will invade your psyche and get under your skin, addictive like those recent children's books in which you must study the image to determine what ordinary objects were employed to create each scene, only with Crewdson's image the payoff is in your own imagination rather than in the literal identification of the artifacts. Sharp-focus, narrative, representational, brilliant color tableau of decidedly off-kilter scenarios, they are also some of the least literal images I can think of. The photographs are both witty and slightly scary, exquisitely detailed down to the lawn jockeys and paneling and birthday cards propped on a bureau. The degree to which the townspeople of Lee, Massachusetts, have cooperated with the photographer, who visited every summer as a child, is truly astonishing; these are the actual townspeople in the photographs; these are their homes and trappings that Crewdson transforms into his own fantastically designed stage set.

The SITE Santa Fe exhibition consists of two related bodies of work that Crewdson began developing not long after graduating from Yale University's MFA program in 1988. He was interested in images that existed somewhere between documentary photography and fiction; indeed, between the dichotomy that existed in the late 1980s between traditionalists who adhered to the notion of photographic veracity and the postmodernists who were determined to prove that modernist tenet false. "Hover" is a group of black and white images from 1996-1997, Crewdson's earliest series made in and of the small town of Lee, and "Twilight," larger-scale color work from 1998-1999, takes up on a grander scale where the earlier work leaves off. It is a wise juxtaposition, each body of work enriched by comparison with the other: the artist's progression is clear.

Employing a production crew worthy of a Hollywood film, Crewdson flawlessly manages to make these elaborately complex constructions looks positively effortless. While every detail assures you know that they are not happened upon scenes, you are nevertheless more than willing to believe that they are. The scale of "Twilight" is essential-Crewdson explains that the prints and their carefully chosen frames, sans glazing, are meant to approximate a kind of voyeuristic viewing through a window into the scene and they achieve this effectively. One particular image in which a woman and children wait in the crammed family station wagon while the father, holding a gas can, apparently surveys his handiwork as their 50s tract home silently smolders reminded me of the marvelously smarmy Tom Waits song "Frank's Wild Years," only instead Crewdson's conjures up on the elusive psychology of this incredibly unlikely scene. In "Hover" Crewdson consciously references earthworks as well as the New Topographics landscape photographers, creating a series of man-made landscape-related anomalies such as a lawn that extends across the road and concentric circles in a field being created by a lawnmower. The catalog of visual references is as marvelous as it is startling-Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, Joel Sternfeld's "American Prospects" series, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are all referenced to great effect in one or another of the images.

In one breath Crewdson describes himself as an "American Realist landscape photographer," though he is quick to note that the label of photographer isn't actually accurate, either. Heavily influenced by both painting (think Edward Hopper, one of Crewdson's favorites) and film (early Steven Spielberg), Crewdson does not consider his work to be a cynical revisitation of suburbia but rather an exploration of his own psyche through the manipulation of a surreal suburban world. The wonder of the work is that the viewer can stand before it and conjure up myriad references that the artist did not intend but that nevertheless are as clearly conveyed as those that he did.

                         

When I was an undergraduate I took a sculpture class. One assignment we were given was to create an armature and cover it with plaster; it being Valentine’s Day that day, I created a heart. It was February in New Jersey, and the heart was going to be a surprise, so I carried it back to the dorm zipped under my coat. The residual warmth of the drying plaster against my chest was an extraordinary sensation that I will never forget, almost like a sign of some sort, as though I were transferring my excitement and passion to this inanimate heart and it was, in turn, responding to me. By the time I got back to deliver it to my then-boyfriend, I was filled with a romantic spirit; it felt like one of the most appropriate gifts I’d ever given and besides, I’d made it myself. Considering that I was a really a photographer, however, it wasn’t a perfectly formed heart—it was totally freeform and slightly askew and that boyfriend, with whom I knew I was mismatched, made some derogatory remark about it—I think he actually made fun of it. Instantly I wanted to take it back, because having held it so close I already cherished it, but I didn’t quite know how to go about asking for a Valentine back, even from a jerk. The boyfriend wasn’t long-lived, but the memory of carrying that warm plaster heart next to mine remains resonant for me, many Valentines later.

I approached the Heart of Santa Fe gallery tour reluctantly—I was extraordinarily busy this weekend, it was Canyon Road, and the theme promised to be either schmaltzy or saccharine. I frankly thought it would be a waste of my time. I was wrong. It’s easy to become cynical about the gallery business in Santa Fe. Cynicism about Valentine’s Day runs equally deep. Long ago I chose not to go the gallery route; in fact, folks who know me know that I openly disdain buying and selling art. But I also recognize that the gallery world is a vibrant part of this community and it seriously helps fuels our local economy. So I turned a blind eye to all the SUVs with Texas and Colorado plates parked along Canyon. As a result what I experienced was a warm winter afternoon in which every gallery person I encountered greeted me genuinely and with enthusiasm. I clearly was no high roller, and maybe it was a slow day, but they seemed to be more interested in me being interested in the art, and I quickly understood that the Heart of Santa Fe gallery tour is about much more than the art on display. It is about the spirit that you the viewer bring to it and the openness that you have toward the curious conflation of sentiment and commerce that lies at its, well, heart.

The galleries freely interpret the Valentine theme. Karen Ruhlen Gallery went simply with “Red,” and I overheard the gallery person sweetly explaining, probably for the umpteenth time that day, the preponderance of hues to a group that was wondering aloud about the similarity among the works. “Heart and Sole/Soul” at Dreamtime Gallery features moving “love stories” by Australian Aboriginal artists. Gabriella Possum Nungarrayi’s silkscreen “Love Story” was so luminous and beautiful it nearly jumped off the wall. Cynthia Fusillo’s “A Love Poem for My Mother (Sea)” at Guadalupe Fine Art was equally wonderful. I wasn’t sure if the persistent sound of water dripping was part of the piece or was simply snow melting overhead, and I forgot to ask, but either way it worked. Ordinarily I’m lazy in a gallery if there’s a lot of text to read, but this installation, featuring a dress of poems, copper scales, and sand, with poetry written on the walls surrounding it, had me riveted. I read every word. I was sorry to have missed the artist on opening night bedecked with hennaed poetry à la The Pillow Book, but I was delighted to find out that on Sunday, February 11, from 3-5 p.m. the gallery will feature a poetry reading by the local artists whose works Fusillo excerpted in her installation. The show also includes Fusillo’s mixed media pieces, but I was more focused on the installation. It was magical. Turner Carroll Gallery opted for a more enigmatic and even melancholic interpretation of the theme. There are some powerfully engaging pieces in that lovely, slightly haunting show. By the end of the day even I had bought a piece for my Valentine by Shyanne Stambaugh, a fourth-grade student from Acequia Madre School whose work was part of a special exhibit at Patricia Carlisle Fine Art. All proceeds from the sale of the students’ work goes to support art education at the school. At Carlisle I was also taken in by Marie Najera’s paintings—vibrant and witty, they were a standout among some other wonderful work I saw on the tour. In addition, miniature pony sculptures by twenty New Mexico grade school students are featured in each of the participating galleries as a part of ARTsmart’s Pony Power. A month-long silent auction for the works, which will close at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, February 24, will benefit art supplies and education in New Mexico schools.

The day I went to experience the Heart of Santa Fe gallery tour I was coincidentally wearing my favorite sweater, one that my mother bought for my father when they were courting about fifty years ago. Later that evening I stood under the stars in Albuquerque listening to a stranger describe how she fell in love with her husband of twenty-one years after viewing one of his sculptures when they were graduate students. The connection between love and memory and between what the artist creates and what the viewer experiences is always highly personal; we can intellectualize and theorize and analyze but generally what it really comes down to is whether or not the moment or the piece moves you. Not everyone will make that connection between what is offered and what is accepted. That old boyfriend didn’t get it; I almost didn’t. But I’m willing to bet that if you make the effort to take this tour, you may learn something about yourself, or art, or even Santa Fe galleries on a winter afternoon. And I guarantee you won’t feel any less a part of the gallery experience if, inspired, you go home and simply make your own paper heart and give it away.

                         

"Bella Figura: A Group Show Celebrating the Human Figure" at Segreto Contemporary Art runs the gamut from traditional black and white photographic nudes to large-scale abstract steel sculptures. With more than twenty-one artists exhibiting multiple works in the cozy, 5-room gallery, the show is chock-full of work, much of which I would have liked to see isolated with some breathing space. Gallery owners Terrence M. Fehr and Charles Schweigert include their own work in the show; about half of the artists are the gallery's regulars; the other half were invited to participate for this exhibition. Clearly Fehr and Schweigert know their artists and enjoy showing their work, and that enthusiasm is apparent. The result is a diverse exhibition with pieces vying for your attention throughout. Don't hesitate to look in every nook and cranny-there's bound to be an interesting little piece there, like Riha Rothberg's "Tiny Lady" hung high on the wall and nearly missed behind a tall sculpture, or Jamie Gagan's "Part of a Whole."

The first room that the visitor enters is dominated by Jon Carver's striking large canvas, "Clean," although two smaller Carver works, "Burning Message" and "Carnivale," each featuring a solitary female figure directly engaging the viewer, are the stand-outs. Vivid, humorous, evocative, and slightly wicked, these two paintings are vibrant knockouts. Layered throughout the rooms are Joe Wheaton's large-scale oxidized steel sculptural figures-perhaps these more than any I would have liked to experience with a bit more space as their forms tended to get swallowed up by the visual array surrounding them. More scaled for the gallery experience is Don Li-Leger's appealing group of small etchings, particularly the delightfully laconic "Looking for Clover." Sharon Schwartzmann's paintings "First of the Spring Thaws," "Blue Flames," and "Shadows" are the best of her works represented-each is spare and moody. Iwaski's three pieces from the Raven Series, the Black and White Series, and "The Crow-A Grim Tale" were wonderful, as were Dee Anne Wagner's "Grapefruit" monotypes (which had me puzzling: why grapefruits?) and "Man in a Green Hat." Cynthia Atwood's "Leatherman" sculpture was the most compelling of her three works but it seemed rather forlorn in its corner space as though it were being punished there.

I am partial to photography and Louise Roach's mixed media photographic works are outstanding. While the two "Through the Looking Glass" constructions immediately draw your attention because of their participatory nature (it's always a thrill to be able to touch something in a gallery), the more traditionally presented "Behind the Looking Glass" pieces on the wall are more successful in their integration of image and text. They are technically beautiful works, a cross between the 19th century photographs of forlorn young women by Lady Hawarden and Francesca Woodman's powerful self-portraits from the late 1970s/ early 80s. Better yet was Roach's "The Moment," a series of seven melancholy images of a man and woman that conjures up the seven last words of Christ: longing and suffering, comfort and pain. On the adjoining wall, Herb Lotz's more traditional black and white photographs of male nudes includes the "Brian's Arm" series. Cropped to near-abstraction and centrally dominant within the frame, these six studies of a slightly scarred, rather nondescript area of the body are more compelling than the fully representative sculpturally posed bodies.

There were a few instances in which I thought a particular artist's works should not have been separated in the various rooms; they cleared related to one another and making the connection amidst all of the other works was a bit distracting. Although the exhibition is coherent thematically, many of the works did not relate to one another, at times detracting from the experience of each. However, there is some wonderful work on display in "Bella Figura"-don't let the salon-style presentation deter you.

                         

The theme of the invitational exhibition "Couples" at the Darkroom is broadly interpreted-ranging from the expected human couples to other kinds of pairings that take place both within and outside of the frame. Curator Diane DiRoberto, who runs the Darkroom, has wisely assembled a varied yet strong group of images that holds together thematically while letting each image stand on its own. Though mostly gelatin silver prints, the photographs encompass a variety of media, from Polaroid transfers to Iris digital prints. The work ranges from beginning to advanced, yet all of the work is wonderfully executed and well presented. All of the artists are local and either work or teach at the facility: Mike Herbert, Wayne Wilburn, Richard Khanlian, Noreen O'Brien, David Ebeltoft, Jenn Moller, Liz King, Sharon Wharton, Bill Hite, Andrew Mosedale, Alison Watson, Bruce Taylor Hamilton, Patti Levey, Andrea Cypress, Diane DiRoberto, Harriet Blum, and Marcia Reifman.

On one end of the pictorial spectrum are works that are more formal than conceptual, such as "Dos Flores" by Mike Herbert, a subtle, lovely, still life of lilies in a vase. Noreen O'Brien's Polaroid transfer diptych, "Beet" and "Beet & Mango," pushes the still life genre a bit further, using the shallow-focus intimacy of the medium to render the forms more abstractly. Sharon Wharton's "Two Trees," a small color print, is a purely photographic image; that is, the spatial tension within the frame depends entirely upon the mechanical objectivity of the medium. Wayne Wilburn's series of "Figure Studies" are traditional, classically aesthetic renderings of the female body. Perhaps more interesting in a similar vein is Richard Khanlian's "Male/Female," which presents two classical nude forms with a slight twist-rather than picture idealized bodies, Khanlian depicts the models' bodily hair, stretch marks, and freckles, their human imperfection allowing the viewer to analyze the definition of ideal beauty and form.

On the other end of the spectrum is Patti Levey's doppelgänger "Self-Portrait" triptych in which she pairs nude images of herself with ghost-like "twins," also of herself, interacting with the primary figure. The group is a stand out for the emotional complexity of the pairings. It is not easy to achieve this kind of subtle relationship in the camera, nor is it simple in the darkroom process, but Levey has created a remarkable, credible tension between her two selves. Marcia Reifman's large-scale "Takes Two" interprets the show's theme more conceptually, presenting nine "multi-media silver prints" mounted in a large grid of a pregnant body which explores the physical stages of what happens when couples "couple." Pregnant women have long been a photographer's staple and Reifman's piece breathes new life into the subject matter.

In between is a variety of interesting images, from Jenn Moller's evocative "Landscape II," a surrealistic mirrored image of an empty highway, to Andrea Cypress' SX-70 Polaroid setups which are reminiscent of David Levinthal's tableau. There is also some sweet humor and sentimentality that rounds out the show: Diane DiRoberto's "Matisse and Monet," a dual portrait of two dogs and "Liz King's "Front Row Seats," respectively, provide a little something to appeal to every viewer. There's never the space to discuss each image in a group show, so simply go and see it for yourself. The presentation of the works is extremely professional, and the small, casual, and comfortable space is quite inviting. While viewing the works on the walls you are likely to encounter a working artist squinting at a just-developed print in a tray as he or she emerges from the darkroom to get a better look. It's a significant juxtaposition in this fine art gallery-laden town; it demystifies the photographic aura a bit and brings the viewer into a closer relationship with the nuts and bolts of the process. "Couples" is available for viewing during the Darkroom's regular hours, 9 - 5 (it is sometimes closed for lunch, so call before a midday visit), through the middle of January. All of the works in the exhibition are for sale.

                         

"Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-43" is photographer David Levinthal's earliest post-graduate school photographic work. This body of images was a collaboration with Levinthal's classmate, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, for a book of the same name first published in 1977. Using both HO and 1:32 scale model figures, Levinthal created World War II tableaus of the German troop Army Group Center. He then photographed the models in black and white using a shallow depth of field to carefully control the focus. The controlled focus transforms these figures, which the photographer easily allows are not terribly realistic in sharp focus, to become absolutely convincing as real soldiers. While we know that these are toys, a necessary suspension of disbelief has always lain at the heart of photography-Levinthal's work relies on our persistent, stubborn desire to believe what we see. Trudeau, in the book's introduction, said it best that Levinthal "has set up an exquisite tension between the integrity of the object and the horror of its context, between the innocence of the facsimile and the insidiousness of the original." What Levinthal also does is expose the insidious creepiness of toys as propaganda, of these things that are made for children to play with, to be entertained by. The tension between reality and play is at the heart of all of Levinthal's work.

As viewers whose view of reality is often filtered through a media lens, we also have a strong tendency to aestheticize tragedy, and Levinthal is fully aware of this. By diluting his developer Levinthal softened the high-contrast Kodalith paper, giving the grainy images the nostalgic, warm golden tinge of faded press prints, thus further heightening our belief in their "veracity." When Levinthal first exhibited the work, some viewers believed that he and Trudeau had discovered a trove of old war photographs that they had reworked, while others expressed surprise that the youthful Levinthal could have really been a photographer during the 1940s. Such is the power of these images: their absolute ability to convince the viewer despite all of the evidence of artifice.

Curators David Ebelhoff and Sarah Williams have organized the vintage prints (circa 1974-1977) into a logical narrative, prompting the photographer during a recent walk-through to remark on their juxtaposition of an image in which a burned-out building is seen from the outside hung next to another view looking from within that same structure. In addition to the individual prints, they have included "process-oriented objects" that allow the viewer to explore the artist's process. Two contact sheets, paste-ups from the book showing Trudeau's layout and design using the images, and a detailed panorama built by David Pagel using 1:32 figures give the viewer a fuller sense of the project's conception and realization. (The Pagel diorama is not original to the project.) This is, after all, a college gallery, and the curators have intelligently taken that specialized audience into account with the organization of the exhibition. The process-oriented objects, particularly the paste-ups, serve to further demystify what for many is a very sensitive subject-war, particularly World War II, as fodder for children's play. There is also an exhibition brochure with a short but insightful essay by gallery director Kathryn Rae Buntin that more clearly elucidates the artists' intent.

Special Collections Art Librarian Allison Colborne has mounted a companion display in the Marion Center for the Photographic Arts Library, which is just around the corner from the gallery. In addition to a copy of Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, Colborne displays pages from several of Levinthal's other publications: Mein Kampf, The Wild West, Blackface, Barbie Millicent Rogers: An Original, and XXX. If you are unfamiliar with Levinthal's oeuvre, it is worth a look at this small display to confirm that Levinthal's skillful manipulation of toys and similar objects is no mere gimmick. The library display will be open to the public during the regular gallery hours. Both exhibitions are on view through, appropriately enough, December 7 at the Marion Center at the College of Santa Fe.

                         

Technique is one of the most immediately compelling aspects of Misha Gordin's photographic works. While I was at LewAllen Contemporary Gallery viewing the images as they were being hung there was a great deal of interested discussion among gallery visitors regarding, precisely, 'how did he do that?" We all got up close to at least one print, searching for the seams. To his credit, Gordin declines to elaborate on technique, and while the deliberate aesthetic achieved is an important element of the images, to overanalyze it ultimately detracts from the experience of the photographs. (He does state on his website, bsimple.com: "My first introduction to digital manipulations showed me how similar analog and digital techniques are. Each has it's [sic] bright and dark spots. At this moment I don't see any reason to switch to digital. I still prefer glowing quality of original print and the laborious process to achieve it.") The exhibition is comprised of three groups of images: The "Doubt" series (1994-1995), the OC, or "Old Crowd" series (1987-1991), and the NC, or "New Crowd" series (1996-1999). Considering the dates of the earlier images, you might pretty much rule out digital manipulation. Yes, they are technically marvelous, however Gordin came to achieve the effects. But the images are also deeply personal and almost spiritually moving, and it is this aspect of their presence that remains with you long after you have left the gallery. Sometimes a photograph can evoke the sense of sound: Gordin's photographs are a low, continuous hum, a persistent chant that resonates beyond the print surface.

As Gordin elaborates in an artist's statement, he is not photographing the physical world but rather using photography to express an interior one. Gordin, a Latvian émigré who came to the U.S. in 1974, has settled into a peaceful "secluded life" in rural Minnesota where his son occasionally serves as his model. In both "Crowd" series, although each image is composed of groups of nearly identical figures, each faceless one is alone within the frame, their presence really an anonymous absence. In fact, each group is a crowd of one, literally (each image seems to depict the same model repeated) and figuratively, multiplying and replicating itself into an enigma. The "Doubt" series, which depicts a solitary, muscular male without a lower right leg, evokes a similar moody isolation. The tension here lies between the powerful body and its physical limitation; the figure seems to struggle not so much with the chains and ropes that literally bind him but rather as much with his frailty as with his power. Perhaps most compellingly, each of the "Doubt" and "New Crowd" images contains a faint yet distinct full moon in various positions above the figures, a persistent recurring symbol as though each photograph exists in a dream state. Despite their physical presence there is almost an impermanence to the images, as though if you stared long enough they would begin to transform before your eyes. I think this is, in fact, what Gordin hopes to achieve, to allow the viewer to slowly release any preconceptions until the pure experience of the images transcends a literal interpretation.

                         

Nostalgic longing is both a blessing and a curse in photography. The experience of images is heightened when the viewer can connect on a purely personal level, but inevitably everyone else who doesn’t have that familiarity is left longing for another connection to the images that the photographer must provide. While Michael Eastman’s sumptuous, large-scale, black and white photographs of Cuba may ring true for Cuban expatriate Stuart Ashman, who wrote the short panel text for the show currently at Allene Lapidus Gallery (and who spearheads a nascent local interest in Cuban art), to the unfamiliar viewer the sentimentality is both gratuitous and misplaced. Cuba is a complicated, living country whose citizens are struggling to exist in the modern world. Positioning them as silently eloquent, elegant silhouettes amidst the crumbling columns of their dilapidated surroundings is an outdated cliché. As images without an historical context, the Cuban photographs are beautiful and lush, benefiting from the seamless mechanical perfection of Iris digital printing. As contemporary visitations upon a loaded subject, however, they leave a nagging suspicion that there is much more to the story than Eastman conveys.

When making nostalgic images artists also run the risk of being too derivative of works that preceded theirs. I could walk through the gallery and identify not just the photographers but the particular photographs from which Eastman heavily borrows: Mirror, Isabella’s = Clarence John Laughlin’s The Mirror of Long Ago, 1946 (which itself borrows from Eugène Atget); Arches, Havana = Laughlin’s Time Phantasm, 1941; Road Sign, Cuba = several photographs by Walker Evans, etc. To Eastman’s credit, he borrows from the best of their best. Perhaps the most effective composition is Entrance, Isabella’s, an amalgam of all of those precedents in which two plastic lawn chairs sit in silent conversation against the faded splendor of a crumbling parlor.

Three of Eastman’s horse portraits are also on display in the upstairs area of the gallery. These are oddly mysterious, wonderful images that imbue the equine subjects with epic majesty. The radical, close-up cropping of heads in various contortions successfully isolates their individual characters. The manipulation of color in the black and white Iris prints works very well; subtle shifts from golden orange to green to near-purple further distinguishes each animal. While the smooth stylistic detachment works well in the horse images, it ultimately distances the average viewer from the Cuban photographs.

                         

Arte X Diez at the State Capitol Building is an exhibition of ten contemporary Latina Artists either from or now living in New Mexico: Elena Baca, Paula Castillo, Cynthia Cook, Tina Fuentes, Virginia Gabaldo, Ada Medina, Delilah Montoya, AnaMaria Samaniego, Adriana Siso, and Maye Torres. While the works represented are diverse in media and content, it is a strongly cohesive show with common cultural threads that seamlessly stitch the works together. I had never been to the Capitol building before and was amazed at the vast amount of art that is everywhere in the building. The Arte X Diez exhibition occupies the center galleries on the main floor and its cohesion is further enriched by its proximity with the other traditional and contemporary works that beckon in every peripheral view.

Entering the exhibition from the Capitol’s east entrance, the viewer first encounters Paula Castillo’s sculptures; however, the lights over Castillo’s installation and podium-mounted pieces were off; the guard said that he hadn’t seen them on since the show opened and assumed it was the artist’s intent. While I could believe this of the interactive installation piece Arroyo, the low level of lighting did not lend itself to the experience of the other works, which needed a little more breathing space; even though they were of a small scale, their impact was not small at all. The next two works were installations: Tina Fuentes’ mixed media Alter 2000 and Adriana Siso’s Song of Cicada. Siso’s piece was haunting and evocative and well-placed in its semi-darkened niche; a low light source illuminating the gold-leafed feet that appear as though they are about to take flight out of installation was especially successful to evoke a sense of escape from the jagged-edged, fetal-coiled figure at the center.

The heaviest concentration of works is in the west gallery—clearly a constraint of the available space as the work there is very densely layered. Elena Baca’s hand-colored gum oil prints are, according to a commentary by Andrea Isabel Quijada (which I found on the New Mexico CultureNet web site at http://www.nmcn.org/showcase/elena_baca/index.html), reinventions of "traditional concepts of oral history in contemporary culture through her construction of autobiographical visual narratives." This is a perfect description of the pieces, the diptych format suggesting a balanced narrative. Delilah Montoya is represented by three works of subjects with tattooed Virgins of Guadalupe, anchored by a handcuffed and tattooed man in La Guadalupana Ofrenda, which best evokes what Montoya describes as the "dark side of colonization, captivity, oppression, and survival." AnaMaria Samaniego’s 1998 monotype with pastel, Donde Hay Arboloes Hay Agua, is the standout among her four pieces, perhaps as much for its topicality as its beauty of execution.

Cynthia Cook’s four works are among the most compelling in the exhibition. Her mixed media self-portrait is reminiscent of nineteenth-century painted tintypes, in which the paint that completely obscures the original photograph transforms the portrait subject into a kind of folk-art icon, an effect highlighted by the articulated frame. Avalon and the triptych Attaining Grace are obsessively detailed box constructions à la Joseph Cornell or Kim Abeles; many artists try their hands at box constructions and it is difficult to get the right balance of objects and order to transcend the technique, but Cook succeeds superbly. The pieces draw the viewer again and again to decipher their content and to study the sometimes startling relationships that the artist has created there. The exhibition is open Monday – Friday 9 – 7 through October 20.

                         

Uta Barth's photographs in the installation, nowhere near, are so subtle and almost aggressively banal that they are either inconceivably mundane, or slyly profound, or both. Carefully grouped in single images, diptychs, and triptychs laid out in the hallway, conference room, and gallery (with another image secreted away in a non-public space), the images are considered to be an "installation" rather than an exhibition. I'm not entirely sure why except that when initially exhibited they were one part of three concurrent exhibitions of works from this series in Los Angeles, New York, and Stockholm. The notion that it is an "installation" emphasizes a certain intentionality that might otherwise be overlooked in the images' lack of remarkableness. No individual image is memorable; none is striking for its beauty or complexity, but as a whole they articulate a compelling conceptualism regarding the act of seeing.

Over the course of half a year Barth photographed a window in her Santa Monica, California home. Sometimes the focus is within the room, in other images it is centered somewhere beyond the window panes. Barth made the images often from a seated position, so they are hung low on the gallery wall to approximate the relationship of the photographer to the view she saw as she made the images. In the large-scale, matt-surface color prints Barth captures the subtle seasonal changes of Southern California, the flat, blank sky so often more washed-out white than blue. The matt surface allows the viewer to engage with the scene; there is no glazing or glossy paper to reflect either one's own silhouetted self staring at the pictures or the gallery room itself. Barth also manages some remarkable little details like the carefully attached cord that outlines the windowsill, the closely manicured short-grass lawn, and a bird in flight over telephone wires that compel you to study them as if looking for clues.

On a pedestal outside of the gallery space are two small catalogs (not available at Lannan but available locally at Photo Eye): one, also titled nowhere near, is meant to be "a component" of the original three-part exhibition. The other catalog, and of time, is "the counterpart" to nowhere near and was part of a separate exhibition commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The work in and of time focuses entirely on the interior home space. I found these images somewhat more compelling, perhaps as much for their less obvious symbolism of a window as a metaphor for seeing as well as their utter lack of conventional subject matter. I also thought that, while they hold up in large scale on the walls, all of the images lent themselves to the smaller, sequential book format.