Image via Hawthorn Contemporary
Chance encounters with the objective visible universe, and the moments it misses, unifies the works of photographers Daniel McCullough and Maeve Jackson in their two-person show at Hawthorn Contemporary, “Where the Eyes Fall.” The exhibition, on view through August 28 offers two very distinctive perspectives on what’s in those gaps in-between the seemingly logical still frames our minds pull from the world in front of us.
Jackson’s work, which is interspersed with McCullough’s in the gallery, focuses more on what might be considered portraiture, though it might just as easily be described more as “anti-portraiture.” Where portraits have historically aimed to generalize, and/or idealize the countenance of a subject, Jackson’s seem to aim for moments just before or after the subject has gathered their composure. Her two black and white portraits of a woman on a beach in a swim cap read as snaps of someone who might be preparing herself for a more conventional portrait. The image doesn’t appear voyeuristic or stolen, but rather taken from a sequence in which the promise of a more traditional snapshot created the chance for a fortunate mistake.
Similarly, a small photographic print entitled Mermaid, (Lake Superior) captures a woman treading water awkwardly and in costume, seemingly struggling to locate the buoyancy needed for a conventional photograph. Instead, she’s frozen in-between, in that crease where the best artwork always seems to find its purpose.
Abstract Vision
Danny McCullough’s more abstract photographic vision gains stability from Jackson’s comparatively overt subject matter. He uses this structure to extraordinary effect, coming at photography omnivorously, searching for bizarre moments, and embellishing them in pre and post-production. Our natural human sense of continuity labors to keep our world in-tact and manageable. Thankfully, there are eyes like McCullough’s to seek out its ghostly hiccups and disrupt its visual logic. A simple black-and-white portrait of cloud above a ridge, eponymously titled, reads as something between formal abstraction and Ansel-Adams-ey documentation. It’s a mysterious enough image on its own but paired with his adjacent piece Untitled (Clouds)—a saturated treeline of summer greens and blues, vibrating against a digitally superimposed pattern of small clouds—it becomes almost supernatural.
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McCullough’s work resists consistent subject matter. The common thread is more about visual opportunity. Which makes everything a potential subject, including buildings, animals, people. Still, his work leans toward landscape, despite the occasional figure or inorganic element, there’s a preponderance of water bodies, stones, and trees. Perhaps it’s just a by-product of traversing the earth with a camera in hand, where the terra and flora simply outnumber the other stuff. His search for strange and obscure margins usually pulls up just short surreal, though flirts with it occasionally. We see this in two adjacent prints in the back of the gallery. An Untitled piece featuring the two human hands covered in butterflies is compositionally unusual; delicate and tender, but in its cinematic color, odd POV, and disembodied hands, hints at something slightly sinister–somewhere between Kyle Mclaughlin’s hands in “Blue Velvet” and Johnny Depp’s in “Edward Scissorhands.” The adjacent Untitled, (Waterfall)” of a spraying cataract is natural in name only. McCullough frames it like a portrait, straight on, Bill Viola-like, and heightens the contrast severely, squeezing out nature and replacing it with culture and technology.
“Where the Eyes Fall” is a fine pairing and a timely exhibition. In a world that has stopped believing in objectivity, the idea of visual documentation and decision making becomes exceedingly important. Like every crisis, the choices are either to purify and reform or to face the complications of the problem head-on and use them to educate. Photography as an art has reached this point, and Jackson and McCullough use the medium to show its slippages, glitches, gaps, distortions, and deceptions … in order that we better appreciate the imposing continuity our own eyes take for granted.
