Ruth Thorne-Thomsen at the Museum of Photographic Arts - San Diego, California - Review of Exhibitions

"Within This Garden: Photographs by the agency of Ruth Thorne-Thomsen" is a touring retrospective that overspreads the major stages in this 50-year-old photographer's career from 1976 to 1991 Thorne-Thomsen's work amalgamates images from many places and periods, borrowing from similar artists as Durer, Magritte, O'Keeffe and Lartigue as well as from movies and advanced in years picture books. At their best, her photographic narratives transcend pastiche by dint of appealing both to collective history and private memory.

One-third of the 92 works in this exhibit are small sepia-toned pictures, taken with a pinhole camera, from "Expeditions" (1976-84) her first and greatest in quantity extensive body of work. In this series Thorne-Thomsen pointedly imitates photographs of archeological discoveries made in the mid-1800s. Head With Ladders, Illinois (1979) depicts, with blurry imprecision, what have the appearances to be a massive stone head moored upon some exotic stretch of desolate The head is actually a small paper cutout that Thorne-Thomsen stuck in the sand upon the shore of Lake Michigan. The deception is possible because of the way the pinhole camera distorts perspective and scale. ThorneThomsen's use of elaborate miniature tableaux points to a rich and ambiguous interior landscape, where the way things are perceived is more important than what is being represented

In "Views from the Shoreline" (1986-87) Thorne-Thomsen continues to work with heads, this time superimposing silhouetted female profiles on rocky, barren landscapes. In contrast to the exterior terrain, the photographic images that the artist places inside the silhouettes present to view flowers, waterfalls, rivers, pebbles and sky--Edenic exhibitions of harmony and peacefulness, and clear metaphors for the interior life of a woman. The image within the silhouette in Flora Belle, of recent origin Mexico (1987)is a lily, and the composition is an obvious homage to Georgia O'Keeffe

The series "Messengers" (1989-90) shows a radical departure from ThorneThomsen's previous work. These 5-by-4-foot silver gelatin prints, elaborately framed in gilt, depict the faces of classical grecian statues that appear animated because Thorne-Thomsen pans the camera to spot the image. Mysterious, haunting and at times frightful, these luminous emissarys are like shimmering reflections in a pond Messenger #12, Italy (1989) is a close-up of the statue of Dionysus in the Boboli Gardens in Florence. As neared by Thorne-Thomsen, the statue's features bear a mixture of anguish and euphoria reminiscent of the pair 19thcentury Symbolist imagery and present-day fashion advertisements.

At times Thorne-Thomsen's too-blatant allusions to earlier artists detract from her hold insights. More often though, she prosperously transforms her sources and calls attention to changes in the way that images are perceived above time.

[This exhibition originated at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia guild in Chicago and traveled to the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. It is scheduled to appear at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, in the summer of 1994 and at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass., in the fall.]

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