Life and death amid peaks and valleys
Laura McPhee: Two Years Later
At: the Bernard Toale Gallery,
450 Harrison Ave., through May 10.
617-482-2477,
bernardtoalegallery.com
The Museum of Fine Arts mounted "Laura McPhee: River of No Return" in spring 2006. The show comprised 40 very large color photographs taken by McPhee in the Sawtooth Mountains area of Idaho: landscapes, portraits, domestic scenes. McPhee presented sense of place as sweep of place. More than just showing a region, she encompassed it.
"Laura McPhee: Two Years Later," which is at the Bernard Toale Gallery through May 10, offers a small slice of that same region. There are just nine pictures - all color, all big (eight are 50 inches by 60 inches; one is 72 inches by 94 inches). Where the MFA show was epic in scale, defined by extension and range, this one is about narrowing in and digging down.
McPhee, who teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, looks at an uninhabited mountain area that fire had ravaged two years earlier - hence the title. She shows rebirth intertwined with desolation. In all but one of the pictures the frame cuts off the treetops, as if in acknowledgment of the trees' eerie, between-worlds status: dead but enduring. Often, the flames moved so quickly they ravaged branches without consuming them. Softened, shriveled, leafless, the branches look like gnarly vines: faux-tendrils that give a further impression of renewal, however specious.
As against that semblance of life, there's the disconcerting way the fire has given so many of the trunks the appearance of something alien, neither vegetable, animal, nor mineral. Charred and stripped, what once was bark has the hardened pebbling of alligator hide.
A temporal tension informs all the pictures: near-instantaneous destruction followed by reemerging life (in the form of grasses and wildflowers), a process that's as slow as it is unstoppable. Time, its role dwarfed by space, was an incidental element in the MFA show. Indeed, it was represented most clearly in strictly human terms, through the maturation of an adolescent girl, Mattie. Here time is everything. McPhee shows a cycle of natural change that goes beyond the passing of the seasons.
Light is the great life-giving force, both there (fueling photosynthesis) and in the gallery (bringing solace to the viewer). That solace is considerable. The clean, clear mountain light is all embracing. It takes in soil as well as sky, the dead as well as living. McPhee's photographs glory in its radiance without poeticizing it. They manage somehow to be both spectacular and restrained. It's a neat trick, but McPhee pulls it off. It's no neater, though, than her being able to function as a tough-minded aesthete - someone as skeptical of beauty as she is alert to it. It's one thing to have a terrific eye, and it's another to have it come attached to a terrific brain.
The keenness of McPhee's eye is best seen in "Fireweed Gone to Seed Amidst Aspens, Fourth of July Canyon, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho," though it requires some close looking to see it. What immediately captures the viewer is the cottoniness of the puffs of fireweed, as well as the fine gradations of white between the plants and the stripped bark of the trees behind them. Yet closer examination reveals a wondrously subtle interlocking of vertical and horizontal planes. Just because McPhee's photographs are of nature doesn't mean they lack architecture.
Composed with a bleak, classical rigor, "Looking West at the Sawtooths from the Fourth of July Canyon, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho" is the least typical image in the show. A darkened V fills the lower two-thirds of the frame; a softly lit, much smaller inverted V lies above (which is to say beyond). A fence of spindly trunks provides a border between. In a strange way, the shape of the terrain in the foreground recalls Roger Fenton's landmark photograph from the Crimean War "Valley of the Shadow of Death" - except what's scattered on the ground here isn't cannonballs but blooming wildflowers. A deathly valley remains shadowed, yes, but it also presents evidence of rebirth.
Considering the epic scale of the setting (the pictures, too, of course) these are strikingly intimate photographs: tight, if very large, close-ups of points in an otherwise vast landscape. "Looking West" stands alone in giving some sense of situating the viewer within a larger location. Such singularity makes perfect sense, though. When introducing a close friend or relation to someone, we don't go into elaborate description. We don't have to: The connection is obvious. So it is with these pictures. McPhee is on highly personal terms with these places, and in showing them to us she bestows her sense of intimacy, too.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
