Exhibit joins nature and culture, the literal and the abstract
"Northeast Exposure" begins a series of exhibitions at the Photographic Resource Center devoted to mid-career and emerging photographers from the region. If Vaughn Sills's still lifes and Pelle Cass's assemblages are any indication, later installments should prove welcome indeed.
Sills, who teaches at Simmons College, uses still life as a vehicle to join nature and culture. All of the 14 photographs at the PRC display the same, ostensibly incongruous, elements: a black-velvet backing; items from the natural world Sills has found in the vicinity of her Prince Edward Island cottage; and her family dictionary, open to the page with the entry for that item ("lupine," say, or "moth").
It's an elegantly simple idea that results in chastely opulent images. Each photograph becomes a kind of stage set, with the relevant dictionary volume as both actor and acted-upon, prop and inspiration. In "Crabs," it's crawled over. In "Indian Pipe," flowers sprout from it.
"I have brought together my treasures from the natural world," Sills writes of these notably handsome images, "with my dictionary, the world of our intellect."
Cass is also interested in texts, but of a less rarefied sort. He takes catalogs, newspapers, and calendars and cuts them up, folds them, and rearranges them to produce relief maps of the imagination.
Like Sills, he draws on the idea of image and text and runs with it -- albeit in a much more zigzag direction. Cass cites the great Dadaist Kurt Schwitters as an inspiration. "Like Schwitters, I'm interested in exploring the world through the disregarded popular and commercial culture in all its vitality and absurdity." His aim, he says, is "to make what I'm photographing -- highly literal words and images -- nearly abstract."
The words and images do become abstract -- but the resulting photographs are splendidly concrete, full of marvelous textures and contours. "Say it! No ideas but in things," William Carlos Williams famously declared in his poetic epic "Paterson" (another example of seeing magnificence in the mundane). The thinginess
Cass puts on display in the photographs he has at the PRC is smart, inventive, and often quite funny.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
(Northeast Exposure: Vaughn Sills and Pelle Cass; At the Photographic Resource Center, 832 Commonwealth Ave., through next Friday. 617-975-0600.)
