Marks of time Hera’s ‘Memory, Identity, and Place’ BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The title of the exhibition at Hera Gallery, "Memory, Identity and Place," suggests questions about some images — those rooted in location — that we should think about.

Since an artist can represent memory only with a stand-in, what is lost or added? How much does a perceiver alter the perception, or perhaps displace it entirely, through the prism of self? How much of the place itself remains, and how much has been transmuted into art?

Feel free to make your own list of issues suggested by the seven artists here. The work — mostly photographic, curated by Hera member and photographer Alexandra Broches — gives us plenty to draw from.

Start with Olivia B. McCullough’s work in progress, "Orleton Farm." Untitled individually, the seven montages are dense with imagery, photographic and otherwise, including handwritten and newspaper text. The montages are not only graphically compelling but reward close examination, as we reconstruct the story of McCullough’s grandparents’ Kentucky farm. Of course, the subject flirts with sentimentality, but that becomes a problem only if, perhaps smelling manipulation, we’re not convinced to take the artist’s emotional life for a ride. Graphically engaging, most of the collages have brush-stroked backgrounds behind a middle layer of bank checks providing a dark financial drone among silkscreened family photos of silos, farm animals, family members, and the like.

An impassive contrast is the series "The Land Viewed: Reflecting On the Historical In a Digital Landscape," by Luke Buffenmyer. The six large, black-and-white horizontal photographs have the requisite scale to evoke landscapes. But to assign the significance of a panoramic vista to a microcosm — to a commonplace setting, at that — is an intellectual more than a visual offering. So the visual ante is upped. We are compelled to look closely at these tangles of winter underbrush and bare, flatly lit trees and make order out of nature’s casual chaos. Occasionally Buffenmyer helps us, such as with a triangular composition of rock, stump, and bare patch. These bare ruined choirs come to life, though, when he scratches onto the negative a small rectangle frame or the outline of a house that isn’t there.

Similar in scale and subject matter are Nancy Dudley’s six black-and-whites of her garden. A better compositional eye is at work here, as she controls the flow of our attention to easily overlooked visual opportunities: a bare patch amid dry oak leaves, left by the flowerpot we imagine; a blur of daylilies that reveal a summer wind; slender bunches of unbudded jonquils, bound and arrayed on the ground.

The most ambitious project is Susan E. Evans’s "See America." Starting with the premise that this country’s popular tourist destinations are too commercialized to waste time actually seeing, she conducted an imaginary grand tour to 29 such places. Computing the driving time it would take, she marked out an itinerary and even sent off 29 post cards for postmasters to remail. One such message from Pennsylvania reads: "Am staying in a Dutch B&B in the hills. No electricity. Was invited to a Quilting Circle and saw some amazing technique! I have so much to learn!" Similar enthusiasms are recontextualized here as put-downs. A 140-slide show in the exhibition recycles the post cards’ white text on black background: "Standing next to Peter Foresberg," "broncos, avalanche, rockies, fat [sic] tire." Lists of imaginary memorabilia are catalogued in a scrapbook.

Providing heftier conceptual substance in the series are Evans’s three long "panoramas" of Kansas, Florida, and Pennsylvania. They consist of words such as "corn field," "hay stack," and "cloud" in various fonts and text sizes, reminders that we create and then see identities instead of things themselves. As a whole, though, the project is a smug dismissal of the stereotypical tourist state of mind rather than such an artful alternative. Call me callow, but the postmodernist dictum that we are bound to merely re-visualize and re-experience a world already catalogued by artists becomes trivial if they squeeze the juice out of life to place frames around dried husks. To unmoor yourself from experience is to cast yourself adrift.

Australian artist Shaun Wilson’s contribution is a murky seven-minute video exploring personal memory images for Rorschach inkblot effect. Four paintings of water towers in France and Belgium, by Penelope Manzella, display quite exotic constructs, not our simple metal tanks on stilts. Like that jar in Tennessee in the Wallace Stevens poem, these beautiful objects relegate their surroundings to their dominion. Overwhelming through scale as well as content is the six-foot-wide "A Community Overlooks Remnants of the Departed," by Adam S. Eckstrom. Silhouettes of trailer park homes and buffalo, photos transferred to the 13 assembled panels, make an obvious juxtaposition. What better makes the link is the domesticity established in the background by lacy 19th-century wallpaper patterns that we can imagine in Montana homesteads.

There will be a closing reception for "Memory, Identity and Place" at Hera Gallery on Saturday, April 9 from 5 to 7 p.m.