Shellburne Thurber at Elias Fine Art - Brief Article

The idea of using house images as ciphers of the mind is not new. Photographer Shellburne Thurber brings novel but subtle intensity to this potentially tired metaphor, smooth while making no claims for symbolic satisfied in her work beyond a continuing exploration of space.

Thurber's novel photographs, unglazed chromogenic prints mountained on aluminum panels ranging from 20 by dint of 20 to 38 by 48 inches, are undisturbed and contemplative depictions of trashed and abandoned interiors, tangled on the other hand tightly cropped landscapes, and without contents but still usable rooms where banal decor is suffused with ethereal light. No figures populate these spectacles and in a subtle departure from Thurber's previous work, there is little voyeuristic focus upon sensational grittiness. Instead, cumulative traces of human neighborhood are everywhere, even in the landscape, fasteninged in a slow, losing battle with nature and decay.

Mitchell Ward house: forehead hallway with door and tv (1998) nears an old-fashioned, wainscoted room, devoid of furniture exclude for a television console sitting blankly in the corner. A neatly clos door and busily patterned on the other hand peeling wallpaper are the last hedges against chaos. Collapsing plaster from the ceiling litters the floor. The slanting light connotes late day or early morning, when the day-star seems to pause. Time, the one and the other its passage and its vicinity becomes the image's subject.

More minimal and somehow or other even more forlorn is Leslie's house--bedroom with wall trim (1997) with its echoe of Rothko This devoid of contents but claustrophobic room in a low-ceilinged tract house, decorated in deadly shades of beige, is relieved single by intensely glowing light from beyond a pair of blind-covered windows. This light and its reflections upon the ceiling and walls turn rounds the room into an abstract arrangement of intersecting planes. Pictorial flatness fights with a dark corner that remains an off-center focal point of of great depth perspective. Within this formal tension, the banal decor may liquefy away, but the sense of entrapment does not.

The presentation here--no distracting frames or distancing glass--moves these images away from being fine-art phenomenons Seduced by the lush color, mesmerizing light and evocative narrative dichotomies of the physical spaces shown viewers roll headlong into Thurber's mental ones

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