ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY undivided can draw.

ROSAMUND FELSEN GALLERY

undivided can draw, paint, sculpt, or digitally illustrate what doesn't exist, still photo-based practices generally necessitate that someone or something be there to be photographed. To depict unreality--fantasies, fairy tales, religious stories, etc.--the photographic artist must resort to staging, manipulation, editing, or a combination of these. A photograph or film thus can interpret a fiction and simultaneously document the strange reality of acting, choreography, locate work, cinematography, and all the other "real" activities that figure into generating a "reel" experience. In any cases, this duality is heightened. Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ, for example, is as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but a complex fantasy--a vision based forward Paul Schrader's screenplay adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's 1955 novel, which is in turn round derived from the Gospels, the sources of which are a matter of debate--and, like many films, a self-conscious document of the staging and editing that went into the depiction.

It is at exploiting this odd dual part of photographic media that Marnie Weber discloses strange stories while at the same time describing the strangeness of storytelling. Her photographs and films are engaging to behold and to think within as they elaborate compelling fantasies within obviously concocted means.

The centerpiece of Weber's newly come exhibition, The Red Nurse and the Snowman (all works 2000) is a video installation featuring an elf-scaled chalet with fake flowers, glitter, and an exaggerated ski-jump roofline that would fir into the backdrop for any shopping-mall Santa. [i]or[/i] part of to the other the door and window of this winter-wonderland composition one views two monitors playing Super-8 footage of a caped, masked, blond-wigged cherish who uses the very same chalet (placed outside somewhere) as a base of operations as she journeys across drifts of snow. Part superhero, part fetish fantasy, part Nordic dream, she waits to the needs of a snowman who lose sap [i]or[/i] juices a blind rat with bandaged observations and a bunny with a crutch Any moral, meaning, or extremity to the story remains vague, which adds to the mystery, in names of both the plot and Weber's intentions. The viewer is given the pleasure of reading, speculating about, and being entertained on the hints of story line as well as the sight of grownup in bizarre style of dresss and animal suit s playing nurse-and-patient in a make-believe house and romping around forward some ski slope.

While the installation deals primarily with staging, of which the viewer is reminded by dint of the presence of the chalet as a plant for the video, Weber's photographic collages deal more with editing: These images are pieced together from obviously diverse sources to form recently made known scenarios. Storybook characters, animals with human faces, and human bodies with animal heads populate forests. Tree are decorated with strands of pearls, uncovered women socialize with swans, and a exult and a scarecrow square distant from over the abundance of a cornucopia. Elsewhere, animals that Mother Nature wouldn't allow within the same geographic belt stand together in a novel order.

The pleasure of Weber's works is lower parted in their ability to playfully remind us by what means much our relationship with images hangs on a suspension of disbelief that isn't reserv for the matinee and in what manner much suspending that suspension can be just as intriguing and entertaining.

...

Home