Bare Essentials
Robin Rice on Visual Art
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What's wrong with this picture? Despite Philadelphia's legion of galleries, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts does a better job of showcasing important local talent than any single venue I can think of in the city.
Right now, a gallery of portraits by Donald E. Camp is a particular standout at DCCA. The band of substantial (42- by 30-inch), almost monochrome prints momentarily strike the eye as a minimalist visual experience. Unframed and unmounted, the similarly composed prints evenly punctuate the flat, earthy red-brown walls. Thick rag paper contrasts with the fragile pins that attach it. But, as anyone familiar with Camp knows, his work is hardly minimal in the usual sense of the word.
It seems misleading to describe the painterly, crumbling-looking surfaces enriched with subtle streaks of color as photographs, although their photographic origin is clear. They are portraits, but unusual ones. Camp has avoided the trappings that typically surround and define identity in a portrait: objects, interior decoration, clothing, hairstyles, makeup and jewelry. The one earring I spotted in Woman Who Sings: Charmaine Neville (pictured) is so secondary to the power of Neville's features that it has only a marginal impact. Beyond the banished accessories, Camp eschews the one thing we assume is part of a portrait — as opposed to a mug shot — facial expression.
His subjects are presented in full frontal facial nudity, without the veil of a flattering camera angle, without calculated or incidental emotion or tension in eyes or mouth, cheeks or forehead. What remains is the stark essence of the person: not a blank slate but a slate on which life has written and is writing indelibly.
Stepping into the gallery at DCCA, we know we are seeing faces, but the race, gender, even the age of individuals is often not immediately apparent. These incidentals are subordinated to an intimate yet respectful encounter. Camp's strategy illustrates a duality: the humanness of the individual, something all of us share, and the simultaneous uniqueness of that person.
Camp has developed a method of printing photographs using casein pigment. The complex process allows him to control lights and darks. It produces vertical streaks of color that might suggest tears, rivers of them, or a face materializing just beneath the surface of water or in a dense atmosphere. He said that this process, which he has employed for some time, is symbolic in that casein earth pigments are part dust and part milk. "Dust is everywhere," he said. "Dust is tragic or magic. Milk is love."
Paraphrasing a line from poet Robert Hayden, Camp uses the series title "Dust Shaped Hearts." Each photograph is suffused with compassion and summons up the fragility of the human heart. All the portraits in this new, never-exhibited group were taken in New Orleans, which isn't a fact you'd especially guess from looking at them, but it adds to the impact when you know.
In a separate DCCA show, Bruce Pollock is exhibiting oil paintings based on fractals. Almost since the Mandelbrot set was published in the mid-'70s, artists have been fascinated with these self-similar, scale-mirroring patterns that represent the unfathomable and inexorable beauty of nature or the abstract purity of mathematics. Or both.
Of course, the colors used to illustrate fractals are arbitrary; Pollock went for intensity in these paintings. His choices suggest music to me: from trippy parading euphoria to delicate meandering flute melodies to fateful tympani and bassoons.
Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts | "Donald E. Camp: Dust Shaped Hearts — New Orleans," through Jan. 6, 2009, Dupont I Gallery; "Bruce Pollock: Levity," through Nov. 16, Beckler Family Members' Gallery; 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, Del., 302-656-6466, thedcca.org
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