Visual Art: Photography and Sculpture at Vertigo

The Spring 2008 Show opened at Vertigo last night, featuring photographs by Richard Peterson and Bob Coller Jewett and stone sculptures by Scott Davis. Peterson exhibited a series of double-print photographs, half of which were fully developed and the other half consisting of the same images developed by solarization (a technique invented by ManRay that creates a reversal effect of positive and negative space in black and white film). Part of the series feels something like a retro 70’s film (and not just a B-grade retro film), --the good kind that would involve crime, scandal, and torrid love affairs starring well-lipsticked actresses smoking cigarettes. And the other part of the series is reminiscent of ManRay himself, as a re-imagining of the photographed nude. There’s a certain sexiness that arises from the dualistic tensions Peterson uses with the reversed, mirror-like compositions that further ups the ante on the almost cinematic drama he captures. Bob Coller Jewett’s photographs consist of highly intricate color patterns, that on closer look, are often of natural objects (leaves, petals, etc…) The result is a kaleidoscopic array of color and geometry that doesn’t really look like a photograph (or painting, or anything else) so much as it looks like a very precise, indeterminate portrayal of beauty (perhaps the essence of art itself). The pieces are both centered and fragmentary, something like still life but composed so that the eye can’t settle. Scott Davis’s rock sculptures (created from the local substance, rhyolite, which is common in Castle Rock) are scattered through the main gallery between Peterson and Jewett’s photographs. These sculptures have the strange quality of appearing both natural and manipulated: capturing what the mind intuitively does when looking at large rocks and seeing them as castles, for example. However, my personal favorite of the exhibition can be found in the bathroom where Davis is also exhibiting three pen and ink drawings. A last minute add-on to the show, Davis explained the decision to hang them in the restroom was because it was the only wall space still available. “I’d rather show my drawings than not.”

The Spring Show will be on-view at Vertigo Art Space , 960 Santa Fe Dr, through May 31st. For more info visit www.vertigoartspace.com