The eleven images by seven photo-artists, working in color and black-and-white, in this decidedly modernist show, run the gamut from Sebastian Bremer’s illusionist abstraction of pulsing waves that breaks down into spiny curlicued lines on close inspection, to Daniel Gordon’s stunning surrealist image of confused dismemberment, “Blonde Wig.” In between are James Welling’s two elegant studies of etiolated flowers, Walead Beshty’s four miniature geometric studies, Barbara Kasten’s layered and filmy abstraction, Tamara Halpern’s blurred, layered and segmented abstraction with surrealist overtones, and Sara VanDerBeek’s out-front surrealist construction of a headless torso covered by a draping scroll. Extremism in the cause of art wins here with “Blonde Wig,” in which the lightly curled and flowing tousled headdress bedecks an inverted, cracked, bandaged and disfigured mask of a young woman, whose eyes shine out at us eerily and the top of whose head is resting on a man’s extended arm. None of the images here is conceptual; they have their impacts, for the abstractionists, in the play of forms of visual perception—more or less reduced to pure shape—and, for the surrealists, in the unbridled dreamlike imagination, more or less nightmarish. (Michael Weinstein)
Through May 15 at Tony Wight Gallery, 845 W. Washington
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