Karen Brett and Larissa Fassler
The Sexual Landscape Recast
June 7th to July 7th, 2007.
Gallery 44, 401 Richmond St.
By Patrick Kaipainen
Posted July 2nd, 2007
The Sexual Landscape Recast is an exhibition faced with the difficulty of navigating the tension between the sensuous and the conceptual. This, of course, is an issue that all art must negotiate, but the work of Karen Brett and Larissa Fassler offers a telling example.
Fassler's series Teen Couples I and Teen Couples II sets out to investigate the myths surrounding teenage sexuality and challenge pop culture images of nubility, libidinous excess, and sexual confidence with representations of self-conscious awkwardness. Her photographs of teen couples are staged, but nonetheless sincere and human. Indeed, Fassler's images do exactly what images ought to do, according to Siegfried Kracauer, who argued "that it is photography's (and cinema's) vocation to make visible minute similarities, everyday commonness and shared experiences in the social fabric."
The only problem is that Fassler's images are boring. The work makes too much of the conceptual, and seems to diverge into sociology, all the while neglecting the immutable rule that art requires sensuous experience. This is not to say that she hasn't demonstrated that she knows what a photograph is, but that she has scarcely attempted to use it as art.
Karen Brett's photographs from The Myth of Sexual Loss are informed by ideas of sexuality and aging and, like Fassler's series, challenge the taboos and expectations precipitated by a certain demographic. All similarity ends, however, at this level of the thematic.
Despite the large format of Brett's images, they are endowed with a sense of intimacy. This is due as much to the nakedness of her aged subjects as it is to the close cropping of the photographs.
The diffuse and perfectly white lighting employed by Brett brings out subtle gradations in wizened skin. This naturalistic light also endows the photographs with a sense of open air, frankness and humble confidence. The visibility of film grain adds warmth. Brett's selective focus and shallow depth of field create abstract zones within the representational picture where colour is allowed free play.
With these formal considerations in mind, it should also be noted that Brett's photographs still fulfill the criteria set by Kracauer, though in a more subtle and intuitive way.
There is a great deal of sex in Brett's pictures, much more so than in those of Fassler. However, it's not pornographic, but the artist's acknowledgment of the viewer's embodiment, in her apparent facility with the aesthetic, and the consequent delight brought about by the formal qualities of her work.