Altered perception

What is The Future of Now in fine art photography? Local photographer/curator Peter Pachano begins to answer the question in a group exhibition at City Hall East. The reference point for Pachano is earlier innovative works by artist photographers like Ed Rusha, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston. He’s selected seven local artists whose work steps around or walks straight through photography on the way to somewhere else. Many of the images fuse digital media and photography; others were created by manipulating the development process or staging the photo shoot. Gretchen Hupfel visualizes the invisible in her plotter prints (the new-tech answer to blueprints). A seemingly infinite number of fine white lines overlay and crisscross the empty parking garage and walkways that she photographs. The lines have an almost narrative quality, seeming to trace movement, sound and light that once traversed the space. Or is she, like a classic painter, obsessively plotting an elusive vanishing point?

Teresa Bramlette’s “RR1” and “RR2” are a matter of replicating existing photo images photographically. She photographed roller coasters from a book then enlarged them in black-and-white ink jet prints. When magnified, the object becomes an abstract woven pattern, its “fabric” revealed.

In untitled two-dimensional compositions, Dan Walsh combines magazine clips of trees and horizon lines, graph paper, computer generated patchwork patterns and foil covered objects. He creates artificial landscapes on a computer, then prints on photographic paper. Presenting the only moving picture in the show, Walsh places seven tiny video monitors on the floor for “The Scale of C Natural.” A digital soundscape in seven sections marks his black-and-white spin down the road and across fields, following cornstalks, telephone wires, tree lines and undergrowth, crossing bridges and neighborhoods. Rippling repeated screen images animate the landscape.

More fascinating, though inert, are Sara Hornbacher’s two identical 2-by-8-foot nature scenes. Their visual experience is like looking through the lenses of an old Viewmaster — using totally new technology to an almost vintage effect. Her “Reproduction” of a lake viewed through trees is not a static simulation. The perspective shifts as the landscape is approached, so the two-dimensional image gives the impression of being three, or more. Beneath the lenticular screens that surface these works lie unresolved photographs, muddles of densely packed colored lines. There are, in fact, multiple layers embedded in the images, much like those in a Photoshop file.

Modular urban interiors are the focus of Ruth Dusseault’s grainy photos of booths in fast-food dining rooms. She makes C-prints from black-and-white film, casting a gray-green pall on her subject matter. Her overexposed, overprocessed scenes represent what became the quick-fix future of late modernist design for the mass appetite.

Angela West looks at people who might frequent those dining establishments. She stages life-sized, hard color portraits of young prom-goers. Three excerpts from her Dahlonega series are documentary. West sets up her own backdrop and uses commercial photography equipment to magnify the vulnerability of kids on the verge of adulthood. A chunky barefoot girl in a silver dress wears her sock-footed matching date’s gilded bow tie. A biracial couple goes for high contrast — she, detailed in red, he, in white — the perfect valentine.

Shannon Nowlan signals a different kind of funny/sad human frailty in Kwik print photos and text on acetate that she suspends in a row of Plexiglas rectangles. Portraits, written narratives and an accompanying audio recount four women’s experiences with their mother figures. Nothing like Mommy Dearest, but nonetheless very personal, “Mother” exposes the fallibility of the role model.

According to Pachano, The Future of Now expresses the paradox that lies at the heart of globalized “mass culture and cybernetic illusion.” In art, as in life, there is no more idea of one decisive moment. Too many variables, too many possibilities. The seven artists reflect less concern with image resolution and editing than with the conceptual outcome of their pictures. Yet most viewers would benefit from more explanations about their strategies, because process is key not only to understanding the content of these works but to the future of the photographic medium.

The Future of Now continues through Nov. 5 at City Gallery East, 675 Ponce de Leon Ave. 404-817-7956