Now you don’t see it, now you do: Manipulated photography and textural nuances unite two solo shows at Raleigh’s Gregg Museum.
N.C. State University’s Gregg Museum of Art and Design reopened this fall after a six-month shutdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. It’s featuring powerful solo exhibitions by two very different artists who share mutual interests in sculptural texture and digitally manipulated photography.
Andy Nasisse is a ceramics sculptor who took up landscape photography relatively late in his career. His exhibition “Animate Earth” combines recent works in both mediums. Stephen Althouse created assemblages from old pieces of metal and wood before he began photographing them and exhibiting only the photographs, as exemplified in his show “Objects of Intention.”
Faces in clay and stone
People are also reading…
Nasisse started using clay as a sculptural medium more than 50 years ago. The spectral faces and figural forms that appear in his sculptures often result from spontaneous developments in his creative process. His initial observation of such phenomena exemplifies a perceptual tendency known as pareidolia, familiar to anyone who has noticed the resemblance of clouds to animals or rocks to faces.
On noticing such developments as he sculpts his wet clay, Nasisse enhances and encourages them. The results are invariably evocative — sometimes eerie, at other times amusing and often a little of both.
His exhibition at the Gregg offers an assortment of cases in point. Six are mask-like sculptures mounted on walls, and the other 16 are larger works on pedestals, mostly grouped in the center of the gallery so they can be viewed in the round.
Heart-shaped forms are prominent in this selection, accounting for more than one-fourth of the sculptures. Some are variations on the iconic Valentine heart, while others elaborate on the physical, blood-pumping organ, complete with veins that almost appear to throb in high relief. Like other pieces in the show, all of the heart-shaped pieces have faces that seem to return the viewer’s gaze.
Flame-shaped details in several sculptures remind viewers of the fire to which they were subjected to harden the initially malleable clay. Close inspection reveals intricately detailed surfaces whose tiny spirals, starburst shapes and other minute forms resemble fossil imprints in limestone. Several of Nasisse’s most striking sculptures take the form of standing figures whose details and whimsical aspects are overwhelmed by their totemic presence.
Nasisse was raised in the western United States, whose dramatically eroded, mountainous landscape has been crucial to forming his aesthetic. After a 30-year teaching career at the University of Georgia (1976-2005), he returned to the American Southwest, where he continues to live and work.
He began photographing the region’s landscape to highlight its rock formations and their resemblance to faces and figures. Before printing the photos, he digitally manipulates them to subtly enhance these details — an approach parallel to the way he sculpts clay.
“Animate Earth” includes 22 of these images, matching the number of sculptures in the show, which emphasizes the striking results of pareidolia in both bodies of work.
'Secret messages'
Althouse’s exhibition is made up of 20 black-and-white digital prints of well-worn hand tools, related artifacts and white cloth on uniformly dark grounds. His fascination with old tools dates back to his childhood on a farm in Pennsylvania and was reinforced by his experiences performing physically demanding, manual-labor jobs during his youth and early adulthood.
Althouse’s photographs dramatize the objects by highlighting their intricately worn and weathered surfaces, and often digitally inscribing “secret messages” on them in relatively obscure written languages. On one level they can be viewed as monuments to working people throughout history.
To create his physically imposing images he employs large-format cameras that he sometimes spends hours adjusting to keep every detail in extremely sharp focus. After developing the film in total darkness, he scans each image and meticulously manipulates it to fix flaws and otherwise prepare it for printing in a large format on high-quality rag paper he buys by the roll.
His digital manipulations often include the addition of written texts so carefully inscribed that they appear to be integral parts of the objects he photographs. In “Rusted Nails,” for example, a Braille inscription in German appears on an ornamental plaque at the bottom of an old, wooden box of rusted nails. Although viewers need not be able to read German or Braille to appreciate this piece, its metaphorical aspect is substantially enhanced by knowing that the inscription means, “The world holds us captive.”
The wooden door in “Door with Hole” might have come from an old barn or the attic of a long-deserted house. Framing the titular hole in the upper left — which might have originally held a knob or latch — is a bent and dented tin rectangle on which Althouse digitally added a phrase in 16th-century German. Translated as “All this with weeping do so, will with Joy reap.” It’s a line from a hymn still sung in Amish churches of central Pennsylvania, where Althouse has lived for the past 10 years.
Although he’s not Amish, Althouse admires and has befriended his Amish neighbors, whose traditional culture is referenced in a number of his recent works. Playing softly in the gallery that houses his exhibition is a recording of Amish hymns.
Although Althouse prefers the digitally inscribed texts in some of his works to remain mysterious, a printed handout available to viewers contains translations of each such text included in the show.