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“The 3rd Annual Alternative Photography Exhibition” at Gallery X and an untitled show of paintings and drawings by Milton H. Brightman two blocks away at the Wamsutta Club have little in common. Each has its own charms, revelations and peculiarities and both are enthralling displays worthy of a visit, perhaps several.
Photojournalist, art photographer and one time New Bedford Light columnist David Walega is the curator (and a participant) of the Gallery X show, which features 34 artists displaying photographic works that embrace “historical, experimental and analog processes of their creative methodology.”
His curatorial statement expounds further to note that the photographers, whether working with cyanotype, wet plate collodion, pinhole cameras or other exploratory techniques, delve into the nexus between materials, process and image itself.
Walega notes that “the unpredictability of chemical reactions, the evidence of the artist’s hand, and the deliberate pace of analog processes distinguish the photographs from those produced entirely through digital means.”
His own “Saguaro Cactus, Arizona en Route to Los Angeles” consists of four rectangular panels nearly abutting on to which a cyanotype sits. The majestic plant itself branches out in different directions and it washes out to gray, with little evidence of the blue from which the process itself derives its name. Nevertheless, it is stately and handsome with but the merest suggestion of whimsy.
Laura Ferraguto’s “Bird’s Nest” is a close-up cyanotype of tiny flowers, toned with Queen Anne’s lace, also known as wild carrot (Daucus carota). The naturalist Hal Borland wrote, “The name Queen Anne’s lace pays tribute to the flat-topped heads of florets, dainty as fine lace and pretty enough to deck a queen.” It appears that Ferraguto agrees.
“Duality: Fairhaven #2” by Donald P. Johnson is a pinhole photograph, touched by a dark bit of sci-fi eeriness. The right side of the image features powerlines receding into the distance against a vivid blue sky. The sun is so bright that it is but a blinding orb of light. The left mirrors the right but it is largely drained of color, reduced to gray and sepia. The sun is a black dot from which light emanates in every direction. It’s a comic book negative zone.
And what to make of Tammi J. Meehan’s “Egg Woman Stump Fantasy”? The 35mm black and white photograph shows what appears to be the back of the head of a blonde Barbie hovering over a large ovoid and cyclopean torso, and the lower half of the same Barbie. The frankensteined doll’s close proximity to a rather carnal looking opening in a tree stump — and the title itself — likely says all one needs to know.
“The End of an Era (Just the Beginning),” created by Daniel Cooney in 2011, is a dark, distorted and dramatic photo of students and faculty that borders on the meta. The image itself is on the interior surface of a photosensitized darkroom development tray. The initials BSC and BSU (for Bridgewater State College and Bridgewater State University) are scrawled near the photo. Marshall McLuhan was right: “The medium is the message.” Indeed.
Ginny Bivens Troutman’s “Family Archive 2” is beautifully rendered, with stark white text and images against a deep indigo fabric surface. But there was something mildly discomforting about reading even marginally personal passages about something as intimate and “nonna my business” as someone else’s family archive, even if it is with invitation.
Serina Gundersen’s “Self Portrait” (Polaroid transfer on plywood) was created in 1996. Wearing a black long-sleeved shirt, her right hand gently clasps her other arm. She looks off to her left. She is comfortable in her own skin. Calm, cool, collected. Had she transferred the image to paper or some other white substrate, it would have been a perfectly good photograph. But the decision to apply the transfer on yellow wood with the wavy grain crisscrossing her straight shoulder length hair made it go to 11.
“Eden,” an archival inkjet print created by Maia Demer, is a bit of a mystery. The colors are somewhat washed out. It is difficult to tell if the photograph of 10 people in a yard or park is staged or candid. It certainly seems more posed than natural. One man drinks from a styrofoam coffee cup, another eats from a paper plate. No one looks comfortable. The relationships between them are undefinable. It could be 1974. Or 1990. Or last June. It’s as weird as “Twin Peaks” and that’s not a bad thing.
Brightman, a 1976 graduate of the Swain School of Design, is a long-time member of Gallery X and a well-respected painter and draftsman known for his dramatic and boisterous crowd scenes on beaches, in bars and strip joints, and in urban street scenes in New Bedford and Boston.
He is heavily influenced by everyone from Rembrandt, van Gogh and Reginald Marsh to comic artists such as Frank Frazetta, Jack Kirby and especially, the underground comix artist R. Crumb. But that is not the work, for the most part, that is on the walls of the Wamsutta Club.
Now a retiree, Brightman worked for the then Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management, Forests and Parks, now known as the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Working as a regional coordinator, he oversaw personnel and activities at Horseneck Beach, the Southeastern Massachusetts Bioreserve (13,600 acres of protected land that includes the Fall River-Freetown State Forest), and, depending where she was docked, the schooner Ernestina-Morrissey. His job afforded him the opportunity to do quickly rendered sketches that would inform the lush and vibrant landscape oil paintings for which he is so admired.
He once noted in regard to one of his landscapes: “Many hours of my life were spent on hallowed ground where both god and devil hold court … but the beauty, especially at dawn, is all the religion I need.”
Make no mistake about it. He is reverent, often visiting those special places that are somehow both secular and holy, often with a canine companion or two.
The works on display in the Wamsutta are primarily landscapes, lush with vibrant colors that resonate with a sense of place and love of nature.
And there is “Fenway Park,” a large pen-and-ink drawing which, to my eye, is less about the players on the field than the noisy delight of the crowd. It is about the joyful exuberance for humanity itself, about being part of it.
Brightman deftly handles two extreme approaches to contemporary realism: the quiet thoughtfulness of the gentle landscape and the one-two punch of a sensibility that celebrates the carnality of the crowd.
A man who called himself Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh once called Leonard Cohen “Zorba the Buddha.” It describes one who is contemplative yet comfortable in the physical world, one who refuses to shun beauty. He finds physical pleasures are not a contradiction to, but rather, an affirmation to the spiritual self.
Brightman would say he’s just a painter. Perhaps. But he’s a painter with that kind of equilibrium.
“The 3rd Annual Alternative Photography Exhibit” is on display at Gallery X, 169 William St., New Bedford, until Nov. 28. Brightman’s paintings, drawings and related paraphernalia are on display at the Wamsutta Club, 427 County St., New Bedford, until the end of November.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
