Mirrors and colored lights, artfully placed, give Barbara Kasten's stunning photographs their deceptive appeal.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published April 4, 2004
[Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts]
Barbara Kasten, Construct XI-A, 1982, Cibachrome.
Barbara Kasten, Architectural Site 3, 1986, Cibachrome.
TAMPA - A house of mirrors beckons you to the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts.
Do go in.
And lose yourself, for an hour or so, in Barbara Kasten's obsessive, jarring and beautiful photographs.
Kasten is a well-known artist whose work pushes the limits of traditional photography and plays with our perception of the medium. She accomplishes much of that subversion with, literally, mirrors.
When you see her photographs you'll think they have been digitally manipulated.
Nope.
Kasten achieves her complex layering with the artful placement of big mirrors in her Architectural Site series and small mirrors in the work she calls Constructs. Each Cibachrome print is made from a single transparency. Their rich and unexpected hues - a tree branch glows red against a night sky, for example - come not from the artist's hand or a computer program but from lights fitted with color gels, strategically placed like the mirrors.
The Construct series are abstract studies. Other photographers have explored abstraction, but generally they find pre-existing forms, natural or man-made, and treat them reductively in the manner of Aaron Siskind or with montaged images as in Jerry Uelsmann's work. And often there is a psychological element or inherent narrative. Kasten's Constructs seem closer to painting or sculpture in their pure interplay of form and color.
Construct XI-A is a good example. It isn't minimal enough to be an homage to Mondrian's squares of color played against black and white, though you see the influence. She uses the Mondrian idea of color and line, jazzing it with an art deco nuance, more for its potential for optical illusion than artistic allusion. You have to stare at it for a while to figure out what's the reflector and what's the reflected.
You get an even greater sense of dislocation in a work such as Construct NYC-6. Even though it makes no representational pretenses, it's a work of trompe l'oeil, a fool-the-eye composition. It's simple enough, a plaster pedestal is set on a gridded platform. Before and behind it are mirrors of different shapes. But all the color emanates from reflections of objects rather than the objects themselves. Illusory, too, is the sense of depth we get from a dark center spot that seems to recede into the background. It's just another flat mirror. Which is a point made about all two-dimensional art that asks us to see in it a third dimension. We're in that old Platonic cave, believing shadows on the wall are the real thing.
Kasten stages similar mind plays in the Architectural Site photographs, which are sometimes more baffling in their composition than the studio constructions. The primary image is usually of a building - the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles or the lobby of an unidentified high-rise - which she shoots straight on, dramatically lit with bright, sometimes garish, colors. She muddles the architecture by placing large mirrors cut into squares, triangles and ovals to reflect a scene beyond the framed one.
Architectural Site 3 is dominated by a Roy Lichtenstein mural on the front of a building, full of pop iconography and angular forms. Splicing through it like James Rosenquist's crosshatchings are distorted reflections from triangular mirrors of trees and buildings across the street. Kasten has printed it on an angle, further skewing our perspective. In reproducing original artwork within a photograph, and appropriating another pop artist's style, she's exploring more than just notions of verisimilitude in photography but in all art.
In Architectural Site 16, the roof line of a building zigzags like a giant stylized duck, bathed in roseate color. It's juxtaposed with a circular reflection that could be rows of light fixtures or eggs colored off-white and soft green. Those same little blobs reappear through a window, looking more like lights in Architectural Site 15; some of them are "real," some are reflections. The building's stone facade is drenched in purples, oranges and turquoise, with more of those same colors beamed back in a triangular mirror positioned front and center in the frame. It confuses and stuns, like the first time you saw a cubist painting.
Unlike the cerebral Constructs, wit snakes through the architectural photographs, perhaps unintentionally. They can't escape their reality-based specificity, which is the antithesis of abstraction.
Some of the work feels like the hip-hop progeny of Margaret Bourke-White. Look at the curving line of a staircase or the upward sweep of a granite column as photographed by Kasten and you find the same veneration for form as in Bourke-White's images of the Chrysler building or the Fort Peck Dam in Montana. The difference is Kasten's addition of color, which, contrary to conventional wisdom, does not distract from the composition but makes it more complex if less abstract.
Besides all the mirrors and their implications, the exhibition is also full of smoke, in the sense that the work is purposefully deceptive. But unlike a smoke-and-mirrors shill, Kasten steals nothing from us except, perhaps, certain assumptions.
The exhibition is a coup for this little museum in a storefront on the second level of Old Hyde Park Village. It's a volunteer operation, so hours are limited. They hope at some point for larger, more permanent headquarters. I join them in that hope.
REVIEW: Photographs by Barbara Kasten are on view at the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts, 746 Old Hyde Park Village, Tampa, through April 18. Hours are 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (813) 251-1800.
