A Signal Exhibition

The signal events in our lives, a birth, a death, an accomplishment, moving to a new city or another part of the world, meeting someone new or an old friend again for the first time in years, sometimes have ironic consequences.  For example, upon the death of my uncle some years ago now, I found myself reading letters and an essay I’d never known existed.  The letters were written when he was a pilot in England during World War II.  The essay was a description of taking-off for a night mission.  He was twenty.  The writing was extraordinary.  It was painfully bittersweet unforeseeable gift during a period of terrible loss.

More recently, I had the great good fortune to reconnect with an old friend and his wife as a result of his efforts.  She’s an artist; she creates Bromoil images, an elaborate and delicate photographic process which transforms photographs, revealing the quiet, sometimes extraordinary beauty that can hide in the mid-range light.

Bromoils can be as witty as an Edward Gorey cartoon, or revelatory in spite of an apparent simplicity of composition.  Sometimes looking at a Bromoil is exactly like that moment in a great mystery novel when a seemingly innocuous clue transforms your view of the characters and provides the essential information to resolve the mystery itself.

They can affect you like those unexpected consequences of your life’s signal moments.

 
Our friend, Elise Lajeunesse, is exhibiting her work at the Finch Lane Gallery, 54 Finch Lane in Reservoir Park beginning this Friday, January 16.

Spooky and Subtle Images

Bromoils are spooky and subtle.  They are implicitly about time.  At first glance they can resemble old photographs, like Daguerreotypes, for instance.  But on closer inspection they’re also very different.  Greater detail, particularly in the midrange emerges, so that the experience of looking at them is not so much the experience of discovering what has been lost, but seeing hidden detail emerge.  In that respect they can have an aesthetic effect like the Meisterstiche of Albrecht Durer.

A friend of ours, Elise Lajeunesse, practices the art and we went to her exhibition at the Sprague Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library last night.  The subjects of the images in the collection are eclectic and surprising, from medieval cathedrals and castles to lost Coney Island posters to landscapes.  The room where they’re being shown is spacious and pleasant and the art is well lit which isn’t always the case.  We’ve just seen the “Witches and Wicked Bodies” exhibition at the British Museum, which includes some of Durer’s wood block prints, and this morning I find myself considering art that is dynamic through the subtle emergence of detail which can be ironic, even shocking.

In Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie “Blow-Up” the photographer discovers a murder as he sequentially blows-up images of a photograph of a man and woman in Maryon Park in London.  As the images are cropped and exploded the detail increases in contrast making it more severe and the visual revelation of the murder almost gothic.  That came to mind last night as I was looking at Elise’s elegant and mysterious image of Winchester Cathedral.

One last thing, one of the other aspects of Bromoils I find appealing is the process of creating the image itself.  It can begin digitally, but, the longest, most difficult and labor intensive portion of the process is physical and requires a highly personal and subjective manipulation of ink and paper.