ART REVIEW : 3 Photographer-Artists Look Beyond Lens for New Meanings

Anyone who takes a photograph is dependent on the fruits of technology--a mechanical apparatus and the specially treated paper that permits the chemical action of light to register images. But in recent years more and more art photographers are choosing to experiment with a startling range of new and not-so-new devices and techniques. Depending on the way they are used, these approaches can add richness to a personal vision--or can look like silly gimmickry.

Jerry Burchfield and Patricia Whiteside Phillips, two of the artists in the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art’s current exhibit, produce untraditional looking photographs. Burchfield makes one-of-a-kind “light drawings” with Cibachrome, registering the silhouettes of objects in the high-keyed colors that make up the dye layers of the film.

Sometimes he etches through the film emulsion, either while the print is still wet or after it dries, or both. Phillips uses tricks of superimposition in her photographs of people, and paints on top of some of her images.

Technical finesse and a clear point of view separate the winners among these photographs from the also-rans.

The deliberately generalized images Burchfield makes in his “The Relevance of Narrative” series cry out for bold ideas and big-scale treatments. His strongest piece in the show, “Modern Dance,” carries a poster-like message of nuclear doom. Outlines of warheads, each enclosing a glowing white streak of light, form an all-over pattern on the hot red background. Dancers, in a ring formation reminiscent of Matisse’s painting “The Dance,” are black silhouettes with fun-house mirror-distorted bodies. Presumably deformed by nuclear fallout, these revelers also suggest the “dance of death” theme introduced to medieval art in the 1300s when the Black Death--the plague--was wiping out entire populations.

A punchy, immediately graspable image, this piece was made all the stronger by being pumped up to billboard size. Burchfield made the 6 1/2-by-12 1/2-foot Cibachrome monoprint by piecing together five sheets of film.

The other photographs in the series are silhouetted tableaux created with dolls and household objects. At its best, Burchfield’s deadpan, postmodern approach serves up tart little parables of modern life.

In “Witness to History,” palm tree silhouettes gracefully bend away from a doll, seen from the rear, facing a pair of columns and a glowing semicircular object in the sky. A Hollywood aura of decorative but ultimately insignificant spectacle envelops this scene. Is “history” just a another sunset? But the doll’s body is a mutant, the torso attached to a long spike. Maybe this historical moment is the last one anyone will ever have.

“Executive Pressure” is a triptych that renders the Stock Market’s Black Monday in ideographic terms. In the first panel, blurred bodies fall on an Everyman with upraised arms, standing in a patch of light. In the second, figures seem about to lose their footing on the sides of a golf-ball-textured pyramid. In the third, a headless falling figure is about to crash into a tall blurred rectangle.

This approach to photography necessarily makes formal effects subservient to the artist’s chosen “narrative.” As a result, things tend to fall apart when Burchfield’s handiwork gets too cute and fails to present a specific point of view.

In “Place Setting,” the energetically etched areas seem a pointless waste of elbow grease and the image of arms and hands on a plate conjures up no specific idea. In “Out of Balance,” the exaggerated disparities between the sizes of various objects makes for a hackneyed “trick” emphasis. But these are the exceptions in a generally provocative body of work in which idea and method are well-matched.

Phillips’ uneven Cibachrome photo series, “Who Am I: Another Dimension,” is a group of manipulated portraits, mostly of women.

In “I Am Maria, the Flower of Love,” ruffle-edged flowers imprint the face and hands of a dark-haired woman in a black jacket. In “I Am the Sorceress Who Evokes the Spirits of the Dead,” hooded figures are superimposed on the profile of a woman standing next to a wall with a bright mosaic of colored lights. The woman in “I Am the Enchantress” has touches of added paint on her face and superimposed leafy images on her body. And so on and so on. The problem with this approach is that after you see a bunch of these images, they all begin to look pretty much alike.

That is partly because Phillips’ theme is unclear. She says her work has to do with the “universal mystic bond of understanding each other,” which isn’t too helpful. Is she perhaps attempting to reveal the inner, “spiritual” selves of people from various walks of life? Then she needs to find more potent imagery to superimpose.

Most of the prints with added hand-colored areas suffer from the careless and overly enthusiastic application of paint. Applied color is not a sort of instant cake decoration that turns an ordinary photograph into an expressive work of art. Rather, this method of reworking of a photographic image can be a subtle tool that changes the viewer’s perception of imagery.

“I Carry the Secrets of the Ages” is the one photograph by Phillips that begins to exploit the resources of this technique.

In the photograph, three people (whose attire suggests that they might be Buddhist monks) converse on a bench under a painting. The figures in the painting and the people on the bench are overpainted to the point that they are entirely unrecognizable. The viewer is left with two sequences of mysterious gestures in a lofty sunlit room.

But Phillips’ best shot is one that is seemingly unretouched. In “I Am the Eternal Mother, the Nurturer,” a woman and child lie on a couch under a window with a transparent, blowing curtain. The softly lit scene is warm and intimate, suggesting that “straight” photography may suit Phillips’ people-centered interests more comfortably than the lures of manipulated imagery.

Janet Croul, the third artist in the exhibit, is a painter of quasi-figurative, quasi-abstract scenes that involve layerings and scrapings of color. An amorphous spatial quality and a flabbiness in the abstract portions of the paintings keep them from completely achieving their potential.

The better canvases contain stronger passages in which a dominant, personal image asserts itself over the carefully applied and reworked physical presence of the paint. In “The Conversation,” the focal point is a blue chair with painfully delineated contours. In “The Joker is Wild,” the figure’s grasping, cubistic hand is a memorable detail.

Croul’s biggest and best piece is “Cirque du Soleil,” with its bent acrobat’s body poised above a vertiginous scene of arcs and slices clearly reminiscent of the sights and lights under the Big Top. Only when she moves down to audience level and diddles around with dead chunks of brown paint does she lose the energy and concentration that give the rest of the painting an almost kinesthetic sensation.

The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, at 3621 W. MacArthur Blvd. (Harbor Business Park, Space 111) in Santa Ana, is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free for this three-person exhibit, which continues through June 24. Information: (714) 549-4989.