Bold visions

April 30 - May 7, 1998

[Art Reviews]

Bold visions

New work by Moers and Glossop

by Bill Rodriguez

"Facade in Prairie Field," by Denny Moers

The work of Providence photographer Denny Moers has developed a richness and visual complexity over the years. In a current exhibit with the glass work of Michael Glossop, at the Krause Gallery of Moses Brown School, Moers's stylized landscapes have come to merge his unique technique inseparably with their content.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the photographer was drawing serene compositions from indoor architectural details. The curve of a banister would sweep down a corner of an otherwise Mondrian-straight arrangement of edges. Corners of ceilings and walls would meet and balance surfaces of light and shadow, or create a subtle tension. Even then Moers employed his signature darkroom technique: selectively overexposing or fogging masked areas of the photographic paper and painting areas of the print with fixer and other chemicals. A wall might be colored tan or a shadow made a deep brown or gray. A devilish face from a fresco detail found in Italy or Cappadocia might be made to lurk in shadows, all to enhance the feeling and control the composition.
Around 1990, Moers began an astounding series of industrial landscapes, applying earth tones aggressively. He filled skies with bold swaths and roiling explosions above construction equipment and slag heaps, created dynamic action paintings from inert images of urban desolation.
His 17 current monoprints at the Krause are mostly landscapes taken last year in the western Great Plains, from Texas to Montana. Most are about 24" x 20". Like all of Moers's previous work, they present a world free of people but full of their presence. As with his architectural photographs, there is a keen eye for composition. Signs of man are always in the far or middle distance. These elements combine to give a timeless quality to the images, extending their significance from the moment originally encountered and captured in black-and-white.
"Ruins In a Field II" displays Moers' eye for balance. Wheat rows at the lower left run vertically for a short stretch, complementing the horizon line before blending into the rest of the field. Far off, two stark white sections of brick wall stand like monoliths amidst a foundation's ruins. A tiny stretch of telephone poles in the upper left pulls us back into the 20th century -- the kind of small, revealing detail that makes these images fascinating.
But the skies in most of these are far more violent. Typical is "Storage II," in which a great wave of boiling blues fills the sky above a boarded-up western façade and the expanse of a dirt street, colored as rusty as red clay, patterned by long-gone traffic.
Above/below contrasts predominate. In "Downed Tree," shallow roots lie toward us, colored the sepia of age, held motionless by death and gravity. Above it, the sky is another crashing wave-like flurry, this one speckled like spume.
One photograph doesn't fit with the subject matter of the others, but I'm certainly glad it was included. "Black Bush In Desert I" is as peaceful, though powerful, as most of the rest are frenetic. A large black bush dominates the frame atop a sand dune, with an inexplicable black diagonal, perhaps the edge of a road, at the bottom. The plant's mass and fringe-edged blackness gives it totemic power and mystery, pulling our eye in because Moers lets us glimpse detail at its dark center.
The glass work by Michael Glossop is a perfect complement, in mood and colors, to Moers's photographs. Thirty-five vases are placed about the space on grouped pedestals; an additional clear vase in the center holding flowers. There is a dreamy quality to most of them, due to their abstract patterns. Oxides of metals and chemicals, from chrome and gold to cobalt and selenium, add richness to the surface or provide color swirling up from within the glass.
Glossop plays with opacity and transparency for some of his effects. In one, solid amber at the top thins to transparent toward the bottom. Two close together are of smoky, black glass out of which light, wispy shapes rise. Out of deep blue, float shimmering curtains like an aurora borealis or amorphous shapes that could be images of nebulas seen through a telescope. Surface textures also make an effect, as with a glowing green vase that looks like a submerged view through seaweed. A piece in rust colors looks like it was made on a potter's wheel, swirling diagonal lines capturing the motion of its creation.
Glossop lives in Pawtucket, and has worked with Dale Chihuly in Utah and Providence.
The beautiful Krause Gallery wing, originally designed to be a reading room, is an ideal exhibition space, full of indirect light. The current show will be on display through May 10. Hours are weekdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and weekends from 1 to 4 p.m. There will be a gallery talk on Sunday, May 9 at 2 p.m. Call 831-7350.