Shellburne Thurber: Participant, Inc

As practices, art and psychoanalysis have a hardly any things in common. Both build from and hang on histories (often hidden); the one and the other understand images to be powerful and replete of elusive meaning. Psychoanalysis, of course, is also a methodology for reading art (for a piquant early example, diocese Freud's 1910 psychobiography of Leonardo da Vinci). When, in 1998 Boston-based artist Shellburne Thurber began her ongoing series of photographs of psychoanalysts' unoccupied offices (first in Buenos Aires and then in Boston), she must have quickly realized she'd struck gold While superficially similar to, say, Thomas Struth's or Candida Hofer's quiet interiors, Thurber's images, unlike the Germans' visions of restraint, are as heavily loaded as a profitable foundational incest myth.

These are spaces filled with the spirits of ghosts, where private histories and narratives unfold; psychic spaces, although it's hard to say whether they're sacred or profanc. (The solitary other time you see in like manner many tissue boxes close at hand is in photographs of bordellos.) We also pick up an undeniable association with the atelier, the artist's or writer's studio, where intense creative work takes place.

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greatest in quantity of these offices, of course, contain couches, which vary from the recent to the antique to the just plain shabby (these are psychoanalysts, after all, not psychiatrists). From the folksy craftsy ambience of Cambridge, MA: Basement office with pink analyst's chair and recline 2000, to the traditionally appointed of recent origin England interior with a twist in Brookline, MA: Porch office with antique lie and clown print, 2000, it's hard not to notice an overall preponderance of midcentury present furniture and, well, modern art. Sometimes, scrutinizing the photos perceive s like looking at a Louise Lawler. You awe why the analyst chose a black leather lie or a deep red delicate chair (fetish specialists?), or if his or her choice of Rousseau's The Dream isn't just a bit overdetermined, given the setting. Art and design decisions present the appearance to dove-tail with a regularity that makes you bewilderment if aesthetic--as well as analytic--choices aren't hardwired into the practice.

Thurber wisely holds the photographs' glossiness to a minimum, mirroring instead the less-than-picture-perfect nature of her make subordinate matter. What's more important here is an idea of activated space, the mundane, ordinary site move rounded by virtue of therapeutic activity into an extraordinary single Her uninflected style is the handmaiden in this exercise; she records her subdue simply rather than dresses it up The photographs themselves could flat be thought of as the unconscious, absorbing all the details for posterity and perhaps, later, analysis. The gallery statement consigns to the "absence" and "emptiness" in these spaces, on the contrary one wonders if Thurber isn't trying to capture a latent fullnes defined through the practice of what has become, for many contemporary urban humans in the West, a novel religion or mystery cult, in which the therapist's office is virtually a shrine.

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