ART REVIEW
By HELEN A. HARRISON
Published: October 2, 2005
'Shoot!'
Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery, Art League of Long Island, 107 East Deer Park Road, Dix Hills, (631)462-5400. Through Oct. 30.
Subtitled ''Unorthodox Photographic Imagery and Applications,'' this group show explores some of the ways technology influences contemporary photographic art and how photographers use traditional techniques in highly personal ways.
Bernice Halpern-Cutler's street scenes were made with a pinhole camera, one of the earliest photographic devices. Ted Victoria's hypnotic light-box projections use the ancient camera obscura principle to focus attention on small, hermetic still lifes. Meryl Salzinger's solarized silver prints of cloud formations are like negative versions of Alfred Stieglitz's ''Equivalents,'' made nearly a century ago.
The immediacy of the Polaroid process was exploited by Ruth Adams to create a harrowing visual diary of her cancer treatment and recovery. The day-to-day journey, with all its ups and downs, is candidly recorded in a moving chronicle of determination and survival.
Hannah Gray's charming soft-focus platinum prints of children in period costumes hark back to 19th century pictorialism, and Joy Goldkind uses the equally venerable bromoil process to give a velvety finish to her disquieting portraits of her husband in drag. While Ms. Goldkind's approach is intimate, Andé Whyland's vivid color close-ups emphasize the public flamboyance of East Village transvestites.
Tom Steele manipulates the garish colored lighting of commercial buildings, making the commonplace appear uncommonly intense. His ''Fish Shack'' looks radioactive, while his ''Twistee Treat'' ice cream stand seems to have been beamed in from another planet.
A video installation by Ray Rapp uses cutting-edge technology to update Eadweard Muybridge's sequential figure studies. Mimicking the flickery effect of early motion pictures, the images are a series of stills that the eye must process as continuous movement.
ART: REVIEWS; Hunting in the Wilds of Imagination
By HELEN A. HARRISON
May 1, 2005
'Breath of Light'
Omni Gallery, 333 Earle Ovington Boulevard, Uniondale, (631)589-3093.
With the sky as inspiration, the five artists here interpret its changing atmospheric effects in subjective, often poetic terms.
Mitch Gyson's acrylic paintings and Meryl Salzinger's iris-printed photographs come closest to traditional landscapes, setting the sky in its terrestrial context, while Richard Vaux's carbon drawings and the paintings by Karen Fitzgerald and Ruth Sharton are fully airborne.
Using a translucent technique that heightens the ethereal quality of billowing clouds, Mr. Vaux creates the visual equivalents of concert music. Like music, his compositions are fundamentally abstract, despite their relationship to observed phenomena, for they transcend those observations rather than expressing them in concrete terms.
Ms. Fitzgerald's circular canvases are even more atmospheric, dispensing with all but the most minimal references to tangible reality. Light alone, reflected off planetary shapes and diffused in swirling mist, is her primary subject. Not all her paintings are equally convincing, but ''First Light'' and ''Luna II'' capture the cool glow of indirect illumination.
Ms. Salzinger's studies of fog-shrouded beaches rely on a similar diffusion of focus, but anchor the effect to coastal terrain. Drawing a luminous veil across the view, she blurs the lines between sea and sky.
Although Ms. Sharton eliminates the horizon line, she implies its presence just beyond the range of her compositions. Her skyscapes deal with the subtle effects of indirect light, as in ''Crimson Sunset,'' with its diagonal slant of wispy clouds catching the sun's last rays.
Mr. Gyson anchors his active skies to the earth below, but unfortunately the heavily-painted clouds seem more solid than the land.