Constellation of Opposites, (detail) 1996 Constellation of Opposites, 1996 Untitled, 1996 Untitled, 1996 Untitled, 1996

barbara ess at curt marcus by Catherine Morris In 1901 Bernard Shaw wrote about the pioneering days of photography, "the process was not quite ready for the ordinary artist because...the eyes of artists had been so long educated to accept the most grossly fictitious conventions as truths of representation that many of the truths of the focusing screen were at first repudiated as grotesque falsehoods...." Those fictitious painterly conventions, with their roots in the Renaissance--one- point perspective and the hierarchical form of the grid--trained a painter to construct a visually accurate representation of reality in a two-dimensional format. The reality offered by the lens of a camera did not, however, upon first examination, lend itself to the imposition of such a constructed order. Did those first repudiating artists see falseness in the camera or in the photograph? Shaw clearly implies that the reality offered by those early of the photographs are the truthful replacements for an outdated system of representation. Shaw's uneasy link between truth and the grotesque is well suited to Barbara Ess's photography and the archaic immediacy of the pinhole camera. For Ess, representing reality is less of an issue than simply acknowledging its inherent mutability. Her current show at Curt Marcus includes representations of herself, various landscapes, and personal items that act as human substitutes--a bra, a pair of glasses, a stuffed animal. The tradition- laden forms of landscape and self-portrait dominate the show. And, while we recognize the idioms, it is the idiosyncrasies that confirm Ess's intention of shifting our collective art-historical education from the didactic to the immaterial. The imposing sky and natural romanticism of Ess's landscapes evoke the grand tradition of American landscape painting. The dense panoramas of George Inness, Martin Johnson Heade's approaching storms and Winslow Homer's seascapes all have an atmospheric charge and describe a subjective reality. The 19th century's transcendental and heroic proselytizing however is attenuated in Ess's photography by the artist's own distinctly late-20th-century response to the genre. Ess condenses American landscape painting down to an obscured point--a flash of road, an obliquely lit barn--and replaces the infinite with the transitory. This effect, while obviously formally indebted to the pinhole camera that Ess has favored for many years, delivers a moment of contracted viewing, a honing in on and a momentary sweep that comes more from a way of seeing than from a form of mechanical reproduction. While the only photograph in the exhibition labeled as a self portrait Prosthetic Self, 1996 is composed of a pair of glasses and bra, several of the other photographs do represent the artist. Two other untitled photographs show the recumbent artist interacting with inanimate human substitutes, once in the form of stuffed animal and the other with what appear to be an empty set men's pajamas. The palpable moment is again enacted, this time with a the sort of studied simplicity once fancied by Lewis Carroll. The final self-portrait in the show, Constellation of Opposites, 1996, is composed a loose grid of closely cropped images of Ess's face in a series of stylized facial contortions caricaturing emotional responses. Formally the photograph relates to an earlier work by Ess called I Am Not This Body, 1990, which was formatted in the same way, though the repeated image was a blurred, butterfly- like rendering of a female torso with legs bent and knees spread wide. Both these works in their shifting grid form and alternating images relate formally to Eadward Muybridge and his project of capturing motion on static film. The regulated form of the grid jogs with the altering faces in Constellation of Opposites and this piece leans more towards the humorous and the wry whereas I Am Not This Body exposed the body politic of feminism in no uncertain terms. The myriad of elements Ess draws together in this show all coalesce around Ess's singular point of interest--those grotesque falsehoods offered by the first cameras, which Shaw saw as the truthful counterpoint to the fictious conventions imposed on artists to represent a singular reality. Catherine Morris is a New York writer and art historian.