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Art museum photography exhibit reveals natural lovin'
Shaumir Acharya
Staff Reporter
It’s that crucial second or third date when the mannerisms begin to show through- he bites his fingernails, her laugh is more annoying than Paris Hilton, et cetera. An enjoyable dinner becomes a checklist of what you can tolerate in your date. This is more than just a name or phone number, folks.
I was sent to the Cleveland Museum of Art to review a new exhibition entitled Voyage of Discovery: The Landscape Photographs of Ray Metzker. It was there that I realized that going to an artist’s exhibition is like that second or third date. Can you handle what this person is all about? Do you even care what they’re saying? Metzker’s eroticized photographs of nature fondle each other in long corridors, in such extreme symmetry I felt as though I had entered a Kubrick film.
The exhibition is located in the South Galleries where pale green walls recall the Everglades, and each section delineated in white writing accentuates the evanescent quality of the works. The first section, entitled Sojourn, is comprised of exaggerated close-ups where each photograph, boldly framed and matted in white, seems to spill into the next. The works are untitled, and the first piece shows a riverbank where the trees escape off the work. Like fingers, the trees are linear and fracture. They reflect into the river’s dabbled waters that give them an eerie and distinct symmetry.
Landscape, here, is more than just an embodiment of the pastoral. It is an extension of the erotic, the tangible, the fleeting moment. Some close-ups in the series are unfocused, as though they could disappear and never be seen again due to their abstraction. There was a young couple, college students I assumed, in the gallery with me. The young woman began to trace the grapevines in one of the photographs with her finger. Here she was on a date, and yet she was on a date with Metzker as well, trying to figure him out through his photos, drawn to their peculiar tangibility. Even the patio furniture in one of the photographs seems to be an extension of nature, as if they were humans themselves lunching on the riverbank.
Metzker began this project in 1985 in the effort to “try to go out and see things with a fresh mind, fresh eye.” Indeed, the black-and-white stills are alive and assertive. Considering Metzker was a photographer in Korea during the war, it is no surprise he has the ability to capture the vulnerability of nature, its personality, and sexual deviance. The flowers, leaves, and branches abstract themselves, creating chaos. This is more than I ever learned about someone on a second date, I have to say. Metzker’s is the ability to refine vision. This is no Ansel Adams. If you’ve ever seen the Blair Witch Project, you know that sense of fright the forest brings. For one thing, I know I would never wanted to be frightened by my date. I can deal with nail biting and annoying laughter, but there is only so much one can tolerate.
Voyage of Discovery: The Landscape Photographs of Ray Metzker will be at the Cleveland Museum of Art until February 29th. The exhibition is free and is located in the South Galleries.
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Art museum photography exhibit reveals natural lovin'
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