Grounded

by Rachel Frankford

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Published: Oct 4, 2006

The title of photographer Keith Sharp's exhibition at Muse Gallery is clearly meant ironically. The point of "Grounded" is that you don't know where you stand. Or, more concretely, what you're standing on. In this black-and-white series, Sharp continues his fascination with quirky combinations of human and natural elements by placing domestic objects in the natural world and vice versa. Trees sprout from wood floors. Ivy hangs from a bathroom rack instead of a towel. A framed photo of a tree in winter hangs from the tree itself, or so it first appears; it might be the other way around, and the small space inside the frame shows the actual tree. Which is an image of an image, and which is reality? For all these photos, Sharp eschewed digital effects and instead physically created each scene (I have no idea how he shot what looks like water flowing down a curving staircase). At their most facile, they seem like one-note surrealist jokes (or, worse, look like a Claritin ad). But at their most subtle and mysterious, the photos — none of which shows a human face — come close to the bottomless strangeness of the best surrealist art.

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