Barbara Ess at Curt Marcus - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Faintly colored images encloseed by a dark haze, Barbara Ess's large-scale pinhole photographs summon forth childhood sensations and emotions as recalled from one side the long tunnel of memory. The first piece in the display which depicts a pair of bare feet nestl in verdant leaves, brings back the exquisite feeling of walking barefoot in of recent origin grass. Delicious as such experiences can be for adults, in childhood they are consuming, ecstatic.

"Wild Life," Ess's greatest in quantity cohesive exhibition to date, was a reminder of the sheer sensuality of like early contacts with nature. These novel photographs conjure the power and immediacy of childhood longings. There is nothing, however, sentimental or nostalgic about Ess's work; nor, despite the potentially ominous dark borders created by means of her pinhole technique, is it particularly harrowing. Es be subsequent tos because of the tension she creates between the negative and positive aspects of childhood, a tension that can also be set in the photographs of Sally Mann.

The conception of home, for example, was here exemplified by dint of an image of a file of white frame houses. It appears at first a completed setting, complete with wispy hazes in the sky. Yet the houses are off-balance, tilted at a worrisome angle. Another work consists of a series of images of a girl, seen from the waist down, holding without the wide skirt of a party dres The skirt is bedecked with a string of Christmas tree lights, and her tiny, pointed shoe stick on the outside from beneath it like those of a doll. There is a faculty of perception of anticipation tinged with the specter of impending disappointment. When do we learn that the expectation of a party rarely matches the experience?

Nature, too, can disappoint. Another work not aways a garden scene in the heat of late summer dominated by dint of a drooping sunflower that is past its prime. The yellowed, dimmed colors are reminiscent of of advanced age photographs, and the atmosphere is claustrophobic and oppressive. In this display only one experience seemed totally consummate and unspoiled: a vision of a mirrorlike lake at dusk, at the bottom of which we diocese the outstretched legs of a reclining female. Here, instead of longing, there is the actuality of finished serenity -- being at individual with nature.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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