The Wake

Photographer Angie Buckley has warped the space-time continuum in her show “The In-Between,” now at the Larson Art Gallery in the St. Paul Student Center. Buckley takes the photographic past and brings it to the present, while manipulating the faces and spaces that make social and ethnic backgrounds.

Buckley uses atypical techniques to bring social identities to the forefront of art. The gelatin silver prints play with scale and composition, as well as reality. For example, in “Blending” the portraits of two young men hover in the foreground of the New York cityscape. The viewer can see the buildings and waterfront because the faces have been cut away, leaving gaping holes for the Twin Towers to show through. The photograph suggests these men are part of the landscape, and who they are is linked to the skyscrapers and waves.

Similar photographic mutilations appear in all of Buckley’s pieces, which she created with a pinhole camera. Pinhole cameras are homemade, often from a simple box, and use a small hole as a lens. This technique creates images that are distorted in scale. The photos are dreamy, and Buckley only adds to this feeling with her subjects from the past.

In “He Closed his Eyes” Buckley enlarges the photographic image of a boy from the 1930s and places it next to a modern playground. The boy, with his tie and newsie hat, looks out of place next to the plastic slide. The original photograph that the boy comes from leans on the playground equipment next to him. A double consciousness is created for the boy and the landscape. There is also a duality of space and time. Einstein would have been amused with Buckley’s play on relativity.

In “The Familiar,” two cutouts of young women stare out from the confines of a cluttered garage. One holds a baby on her lap, while the other looks on from above. Both are gently placed amid a chaos that could have been in their garages long ago.

Buckley also deals with place and identity. In “Rebuilding” a figure has been cut out of a photo and where the image should be, a peaceful nature scene comes through the empty space. A stream recedes into the background under a footbridge. The viewer can almost hear the water rushing over the stones that litter the brook. The absent figure is understood through the landscape and the two become one identity.

These cutouts also give a sense of lost cultural history, which Buckley addresses in “Somewhere Before.” The piece features a Buddhist figure among vases of flowers and a glass of water. Through layers of places, objects, and times, a dreamy heritage forms and Buckley makes an antique fantasy.

Angie Buckley doesn’t just take photographs. She represents an unseen modern reality – we have lost our sense of place, time, identity, and heritage. The space-time continuum has been warped, but is brought back together with art. What more could a person ask for in a bunch of photographs?

For more information on Angie Buckley visit her Web site www.angiebuckley.com and for more on the exhibit call (612) 625-0214 or checkout the Larson Art Gallery’s web site .