Seven Views

Photo by Jonathan Moller
Domingo, Communities of Population in Resistance (CPR) of the Sierra, Quiché, Guatemala, 1993. Matted silver print, 24 inches x 20 inches

Common Boundary, the 22nd annual juried show at the Center For Photography At Woodstock, features the work of seven very distinct emerging artists. The world looks different depending on which of seven windows you look out of.
According to the center staff, visitors tend to be drawn to the photographs of Hideo Kobayashi, and it’s easy to understand why. His “The Partitioned Place” series is powerful, dark and monolithic. It consists of multiple pictures of a narrow, long, room-sized concrete box of which three walls are visible; in each photo, the space is filled with various objects having in common only the elusive trait of being difficult to contextualize. In one, a complex but rusting playground swing with horses for seats; in another, a huge pile of colorful pachinko games; in a third, brackish water and an old white basketball shoe. Each picture is taken from the same angle with the same lighting. The effect is like being at the bottom of a dry swimming pool, at night, with grass growing on the dirt floor and a single light badly illuminating the implacable grey walls; for company, you have the detritus of civilization. Strong stuff—you might not want to hang it in the breakfast nook.
Marla Sweeney’s color portraits of life in small, central Texas towns are subtly scary in a different way. If these pictures were black and white, they’d be romantic. In brilliant technicolor, with an emphasis on the extreme foreground, they’re too real for comfort. The images themselves—children in a wading pool, an old man asleep in a folding chair, a girl on a front porch—are bland; but the artist relentlessly places the viewer in the scene, and these scenes are from the kind of life you don’t want to get trapped in. Everything is plastic, and the people all appear overfed but undernourished. You know what’s for dinner—meatloaf and lime Jello. It’s Sunday.
By contrast, Jonathan Moller’s black and white portraits of Guatemalan Mayan resistors—members of the mountain “communities of population in resistance” the government calls guerrillas—reinforce the distance between the photographer and his subjects. Every face stares hard at the camera, even in the case of a mountainside wedding portrait featuring the bride and groom in full costume. There are a couple more informal pictures. In one, a small child squats in a dirt-floored schoolhouse, copying Spanish from a cloth chalkboard. In another, a man stands over a naked baby on a table made from sticks and boards lashed together, in a hut of similar construction. Only the stethoscope around the man’s neck, and the title “Health Clinic,” clue the viewer to the man’s intent.
In a group show in a small gallery, one sometimes gets the impression that the allotted space constricts the artist’s work. This is true of Angela Cappetta’s Glendalis, a series in progress that focuses on a young Latina in the city. Through pictures of Glendalis Sotomayor and her friends and family, Cappetta attempts to “truly know” a girl during her transformation into a woman. Juxtapositions of elements from both worlds—a can of hair spray shares a dresser top with a stuffed bear—convey the changes taking place in the girl’s life; but many more pictures would be needed to present a coherent picture of Glendalis’ family and to “truly know” her through her world.
Similarly, Margaret Sartor’s series Stealing Home receives too limited a showing to convey a deep understanding of the photographer’s family and history, although the beautiful black and white prints hint at complex relationships.
The final two artists represented in Common Boundary stretch the boundaries with their technique. Ricardo Valverde’s Some People is a series of black and white gelatin silver prints, painted over with black and white paint. There’s a fine line between defacing and defining, and with only four small prints in this series, it’s hard to tell which side of that line Valverde falls on.
Field Studies, a collage series by Terry Warpinski, combines small landscape photos with drawings, text, digital images and variously textured papers. These intricate pieces are elusive: up close, they give up only some of their secrets, since much of Warpinski’s writing remains purposely illegible. But from a distance, they lose the specificity that makes them interesting. They capture the tattered beauty of an old scrapbook—but are they worth the trouble?
Common Boundaries is curated by juror Sandra Phillips, curators of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Running concurrently in the center’s downstairs gallery is the fourth annual Teens Make Pictures exhibit. This year, high school photography students from the Onteora and Kingston school districts participated in the show, which was coordinated by Jojo Ans. The work here is narrower and tends to be more object-oriented, but it is energetic, fun and technically accomplished, and certainly deserving of a visit.
Common Boundaries and Teens make Pictures will continue through May 23. The Center for Photography, at 59 Tinker Street, Woodstock, is open Wednesday through Sunday, from noon to 5 p.m., or by appointment. The center is in the process of expanding to fill the downstairs space recently vacated by the Tinker Street Cafe; according to Assistant Director Kate Menconeri, the street-level space will be used to house two new galleries, an espresso bar and a small retail store. The center hopes to open its new space by July.

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Memory of Loss

Larry Merritt Maranville stars in Next Year in Jerusalem

Brian Petti isn’t Jewish. But that didn’t stop him from writing a play about the Holocaust. In fact, Next Year In Jerusalem isn’t the first play Petti has written on a subject with which he has no direct experience. One of his earlier plays, for example, dealt with homosexual men on an AIDS ward. “That’s your trade as a writer, to be able to step into someone else’s skin,” says Petti.
Petti’s newest effort, which takes its name from a line of the Passover seder, is a “memory play” about a Holocaust survivor asked to give a speech about his experiences. Eighty-two-year-old Moshe Zydowski doesn’t want to recall his memories, but as the play progresses, he has a series of flashbacks that tell the story of his life, and how it was changed beginning with the death of his daughter in a ghetto purge. At the play’s beginning, Zydowski has lost nearly everything, including his faith; by the end he has worked though his loss, guilt and remorse via his memories. “If there is a message, it’s that the need to live is the most important thing,” says Petti. “To continue to live, not just to be alive.” The play deals with remembrance in a life-affirming way.
Petti says he has a fascination with the Holocaust, and was inspired to write the play one day while watching a documentary about concentration camps. As the camera zoomed in on piles of artifacts of the dead—shoes, eyeglasses, and the like—Petti thought, “They’re not talking about the people.” In his play, he attempts to tell a more personal story.
Next Year In Jerusalem is the fourth play Petti has debuted in the Dutchess County area. Of the previous three, two have gone on to brief off-Broadway runs. Jerusalem will play the Cunneen-Hackett center in Poughkeepsie May 1, 2, 7 and 8. Admission is $10, $8 for students, seniors and groups. There is also a one-night stand May 23 in Monroe to benefit the Orange County Food Pantry. For tickets or other information, call 471-1221.

 

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When The Muses Moan

Poet Shirley Powell

Obviously, I’ve been out of the poesy loop too long. What the heck is Gothic poetry? Verses by black-draped, white-faced, gloom-rock bards of the weighty and the wicked?
The Goths were a Germanic tribe who sacked jaded Rome. Similarly, the Gothic poets blasted the post-Vietnam cynicism of the ‘70s and early ‘80s with a return to an older, more visceral style. Shirley Powell, founder of the Stone Ridge Poetry Society, was a preeminent member of the early ‘70s Gothic set that descended upon Greenwich Village in the literary equivalent of a raiding party. Her new collection, Other Rooms, is a fine example of the supernatural and surreal style of the Gothic set.
Powell’s work is not limited to the creepy, even if the first poem in this handsome hand-made volume is about vampire bats. But the 110-page collection, ornamented with engravings of medieval doorknockers and published by Grim Reaper Books, does have a definite leaning toward the macabre. “The Chair” tells the story of the rocking chair that rocks itself since grandma died—and the granddaughter who is rocked to death in it. “As If The Dead Need Help Too” brings a touch of the surreal to the subject: after conversing with two dead people in a dream, the speaker states, “Even after waking/I’ve decided to avoid/the dead. You’d think/they wouldn’t call attention/to themselves unless it was important.”
Other Rooms, which recently went into its second printing, is a mixture of the ancient and the modern. Printed on premium “autumnal” paper in a typeface based on designs by early Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, the text is also available in HTML format as a Poet’s Press Book On Disk, and can be accessed via the Internet at www.nywcafe.com. But if you admire the physicality of books, get the acid-free, hand-bound version from The Poet’s Press, 84 Columbia Terrace #2, Weehawken, NJ 07087. Or call (201) 271-0992 for more information.
On Friday, May 7 at 8 p.m., Shirley Powell will be reading with Lei Issacs as part of a Crazy Ladies Poetry Reading at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Kingston on Sawkill Rd. For further information call 331-2884.