Photographic art rises to challenge

Press, 31 August 1989, Page 22

Photographic art rises to challenge

“Absence: Presence” Recent works by Adrienne Martyn at the Jonathan Jensen Gallery. Reviewed by Pat Unger. Any fear that photography is fading away like an old snapshot is not borne out by Adrienne Martyn’s exhibition at the Jonathan Jensen Gallery.

Television has now replaced the photograph as the Western world’s main message bearer and electronic media imagery generated by video and computer may soon supercede photography’s traditional silver-based process.

However, this gives photography room to become a more subjective and interpretive medium. Martyn rises to the challenge. Her pictures are not statements of reality or “mirrors with a memory” but frames that reveal emotional profiles of subjects within moodenhancing environments. Experience with

freelance photography, film, performance and visual journalism help to enhance these psychodramas in old colonial settings. Darkened gallery space intensifies the play of human passion, which ranges from pathos, through tragi-comedy to the ecstatic.

Formal images such as an old ornate wooden circular staircase with “bright-dark” lighting and panels of decorative plaster ceiling or wall panel become integral parts of these human melodramas.

Significantly posed nudes, along with unwavering, confrontational portraits, challenge the viewer. In “Guardian” the female nude at the foot of the stairs shows aggressive neutrality heavily tinged with roleplaying as “selector” for higher things. The same staircase, repeated four times becomes the backdrop for an adult male in

the “Birth” position. It parodies the sublime and looks ridiculous.

"Ascension,” “Execution” and “Presence” are impressive works and "Untitled” is a hauntingly strong trilogy.

A blurred woman, wildly moving against the rich tapestry of a tombstone, is flanked on both sides by the claustrophobic stairwell. Another suggests revolution, history and entrapment while a straight profile captures an individual isolated in crumbling ornamentation. All are superbly composed. The level of interplay between various elements (and their lighting) shows great use of photography’s special qualities. Martyn contrives some compelling monographs. She unites two and threeframe formats with a feel for expressive, confrontational performance and a sharp sense of photographic design.