Photographic collages on display in Tampa are a metaphor for life's complexities and the continuing need to put the pieces back together again.
By LENNIE BENNETT
Published October 21, 2004
[Images from Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts]
Hugh Shurley, In Accordance With the Book of Pear, 2003, photographic and mixed media collage, 20 inches by 16 inches.
Hugh Shurley, Bay Bay, 2003, photographic and mixed media collage, 20 inches by 16 inches.
When cowboys leap and kick as high as they do in the touring production of Oklahoma!, you can understand why farm girls would follow them to the end of time.
TAMPA - Difficult beauty is, well, difficult. I'm thinking of Marilyn Monroe. Or better yet, Catherine Deneuve, who subverts her peerless physical gorgeousness in her best movies with a persona that is often unbeautiful.
With her in mind, we can approach the work of Hugh Shurley on view at the Tampa Gallery of Photographic Arts. Take it at face value, and it is simply lovely. Start analyzing it, and you come face to face with the cryptic and unknowable.
Shurley became a photographer to make his art. He's really a collagist in the tradition of Romare Bearden, even though stylistically the two men couldn't seem more different. Bearden's assemblages are full of immediacy, with strident perspectives and startling color combinations; Shurley's look like dim, old ambertypes that have fused, melded and mellowed with age.
What the two artists have in common is the belief that small slices of life pieced together can tell large stories simultaneously messy and glorious. The fractured nature of collaging in its formal technique is a way of dealing with the Humpty Dumpty aspects of such a life. We constantly try to put things back together, accepting the ragged edges and cracks as inevitable as wrinkles.
Like Bearden, Shurley began by using found images, the rejects from a Kodak processing plant where he worked as a young man. But he wanted to create his own and taught himself photography. He does it the old-fashioned way; nothing is digitally manipulated.
Shurley doesn't just collage a surface with images; he stacks them, printing photographs on acetate and layering them, sometimes adding other materials - bits of fabric, old letters - to the mix. The process is as complex as the images. He will make up to 100 prints of the same image, distressing them with long soaks in tea, burying them in dirt, exposing them to the elements, then cutting and ripping them and gluing them back together and on top of each other. Then he gouges through or uses acid to reveal underlayers.
This exhibition goes back to his work in the mid 1990s and includes recent collages from 2003, and you can see how greater technical fluency has allowed him to develop more ambivalent narratives.
Adam and Eve, a 1997 work, is visually obvious. Collaged images of a man and woman are bisected by the spine of an old book titled He Demons and She Devil. The Stairway and Waiting on a Waterfall, both from 1995, look as if the images of a man climbing a rock wall and a woman perched on a precipice, feet dangling like a mermaid's tail, were printed on old leather that has been cut-and-pasted into broad shards.
He uses the same thick, somewhat crude, application in A Prisoner's Search for the Stars, from 1998, in which multiple images of empty work boots march across a floor. Those same boots reappear in the Self-Portrait of 2003, but they are far more metaphoric. This time, a single pair is planted in front of us, and they seem to have a wearer because a tattered pair of trousers emerges from them. The shoelaces are tied to a chair leg. The photograph is in soft focus except for the buckled straps at the ankle.
Shurley said in a telephone interview from his home in San Francisco that the chair was given to him by his grandfather, who told him, "If you need to worry about something, do it in this chair." It's a different approach to the pull of apron strings.
Mother, from 2003, is also self-referential. During a trip to France, Shurley was instructed by a farmer to "look at sunflowers. Roses just open up, but sunflowers are drawn to the light. They follow the sun." He took a photograph of one and, he says, "made it a tribute to my mother because that is my mother, drawn to the light." It's a poignant tribute; the sunflower is in its final stages, mostly a seed cone surrounded by dying petals that Shurley overlaid with an old map.
Do you need the autobiographical background? No. In fact, that knowledge diminishes them. Better to bring your own stories with you, add your own overlays to Bay Bay, a portrait of a black woman holding a doll, her photographed garment embellished with real lace and cloth. And to As Close to Dog, another portrait, this of a glamorous canine perched on a stone pedestal. While a hand reaches out to smooth its perfectly groomed fur, the dog looks away. Its face has been patched onto its body and is lighter in tone as if lit by a spotlight. And to The Long Road Back, in which a pair of feet stand amid ferns and loam. Part of her gauzy skirt is visible, and a woman's face is buried within its multiple layers, lines of calligraphy drifting through them.
The great memoirist Marcel Proust observed that art is a selective re-creation of reality. Photography has always been perceived as the ultimate purveyor of the real. Artists such as Hugh Shurley show us that photographs are as illusory as our perceptions. It's all subject to interpretation, beauty being in the eye of the beholder.
