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Review: Jan Dunning, Eerie, 31 Grand, New York (Feb 13th – Mar 14th 2004)
M: The New York Art World, March 2004
Essay by Lily Faust.
This curious show, appropriately titled Eerie, looks at the shared boundaries between fact and fiction. Utilizing pinhole photography, which is one of the earliest known methods of capturing images, Dunning creates a visual juncture where improbable dreamscapes materialize into colorful reality. Her photographs depict mostly mythological, hybrid creatures that are caught in the process of transformation; or exist in their own right, isolated in fields and wooded areas. Through the layering of clashing images and the juxtaposition of “arrested” movements, Dunning’s photographs work as convincing portraits of a cross section of the mythic unconscious.
Arachne (2003), a color pinhole photograph, shows a woman lying on ruddy autumn leaves, set against a background of viridian trees. In Greek mythology, Arachne was maiden who challenged Athena to a weaving contest and was subsequently transformed into a spider. Dunning re-creates Arachne as a “spider” with four legs and four arms, a feat achieved by using two-staged posing, visually capturing the arms and legs in the slow take of the pinhole’s camera’s long exposure. In the creation of this mythical being, the artist compresses both present reality and the collective past into her own personal framework. By borrowing from ancestral stories handed down across the centuries, she links the imagined to the actual, nudging the viewer along with documentary-like “evidence” of that past.
Similarly, Woman With Two Heads (2002), depicts a woman whose neck is attached to two heads, each turned to the other side. A mirror placed at the upper section of the photograph reflects the image of the young woman, as if to reiterate its veracity. Distinguished by a composition that constructs the pictorial space in an even balance, the photograph is classically informed. The red damask upholstery on a nearby chair whose corner sticks into the picture frame; together with the woman’s soft flesh tones and the subtle, diffused lighting, give this work an unmistakable aura of seduction. The fictive mutation, in this charged setting, seems almost mundane.
The exposure time in these photographs varies from 30 seconds to two minutes, yet a great deal can become persuasively evident in that brief moment. The prints have a grainy, misty look, a result of the pinhole camera’s ability to capture increments of movement over and extended length of time. The slightly off-focus appearance helps to convey alternative truths of imagination; the images come alive as believable evidence of that which does not exist.
Not all of the prints in the show are driven by myth, however. Some have the formal quality of traditional still-lifes. Utilizing the same method of pinhole photography, for example, three works, Racoon, Pheasant, and Small Brown Bird employ the subject matter of dead or dying animals. These prints, interspersed through-out the exhibition, serve as contrasting images that introduce (or conclude) the transformation process depicted in the rest of the works on view. Racoon, a photograph of an apparent road-kill scene, shows the lifeless body of the animal lying on its side, its face to the camera. The yellow divider line on the road, adjacent to the carcass, extends into the horizon; a firm marker of physical nature. The death act, and subsequent onset of decay, though not visible, is implied. The physical is challenged by the force of its own logic; birth, growth and death. And the artist, as if paying earthly homage to her mythical creatures, plays with the visible, revealing and concealing what “is”.