Cantaloupes and candy: Perbeck and her odd but logical juxtapositions
Ours is a town receptive to strange photographs. Artists and viewers still operate under the twin signs of Edward Fausty and Shandor Hassan, former residents of 111 First Street and audacious image-makers, city-scapers, and saturators of our fields of vision. Dorie Dahlberg, Frank Hanavan, and Grant Hardeway have all demonstrated how much urban storytelling they can coax out of an odd picture. Then there’s Susan Evans Grove, an experimentalist unabashed, who finds constellations in the pockmarked hulls of ships, and, through tricks of illumination and shadow, turns arrangements of cosmetics bottles into post-apocalyptic skylines. Grove’s hallucinations teach us something important about light: under the direction of a skilled illusionist, it obscures as much as it shows.
Lori Perbeck isn’t the provocateur that Evans Grove is. But as she demonstrates in “Edge of Light,” a solo show that’ll hang at Novado Gallery (110 Morgan St.) until June 14, she commands some powerful trickery of her own. Perbeck shares with Evans Grove a will to prod at the limits of the classic still life, an interest in how glass, especially bottle glass, mediates light, and a hovering sense that the world we know is slipping over the horizon. Where Evans Grove’s work belongs to the night and things occluded, Perbeck brings us daylight, warmth, and effulgence, and images appropriate to the long and honeyed hours of late spring.
"Bottles and Lace"
Perbeck’s shots often capture the golden moments of the day — that brief afternoon shimmer when the sun penetrates our domestic spaces at enchanted angles and prompts ordinary things to sing curious songs of their own. She brings us a cosmic game of tag: the beams invest the objects they grace with color, richness, and personality, and then those objects shine right back. Implicit in this drama is our knowledge that it can’t last. The clouds will move, and the brightness will wane, and the shadows will deepen, and that revelation so freely given will be taken away from us.
Though there is evidence of decay scattered across the score of deeply lovely images in “Edge of Light,” this show isn’t exactly a memento mori. It’s not a reminder that we’ve got to die. It’s is a reminder that we’ve got to live. We will get our allotment of fleeting magic. How do we respond to that? What, as the singer-songwriter Brooke Fraser once asked us, will we do with daylight?
Perbeck has an answer to that question. She wants us to slow down and allow ourselves to be present to details that might otherwise elude our notice. “Still Life With Peonies and Clams” is full of particulars of light: the gleam of the flesh of the melon still clinging to the rind, the swirling refractions on the inside of the shell, the translucency of flower petals and the hungry absorption of the green leaves, the smearing effect on the convex surface of the vase, the coolness of the ceramic container, a hot, white little droplet of water on the tabletop.
Empty shells and open blossoms
Perbeck delights us with a beautiful picture, but she’d also like us to see how many different things light can do in the same shot. Careful study of the image hints at a source of illumination somewhere off the upper right corner and visible in reflection on the rim of the glass. But we’re also in that moment — perhaps a fantasy moment — where all of these everyday objects are so saturated that they seem to glow from the inside. They’re not competing riotously for our attention. They’re singing harmoniously.
Does Lori Perbeck resorts to un-natural sources to achieve this super-natural effect? Are there hidden bulbs all over the Perbeck studio, caressing each of these objects with enough illumination to get them to shine? Even if that’s so, her faith in daylight is plain to see. In another engrossing shot, a gorgeous, turbulent array of wedged melons, lollipops, and dried flowers sings out from a brown-papered surface atop a table. The lighting exposes various states of moistness: the juiciness of the fruit, the slick little puddle of goo exuding from the pits, the hard luster of the candy, the desiccation of the flower petals, and the tough reflective shine of the ornamental glass cake stand. It’s a procession of states from the ripeness to bone-dryness, and it’s Perbeck’s strategic lighting that exposes it all. She takes us from birth to death and tells the story of matter as time transforms it from organic to inorganic. Take a bite of that cantaloupe while you can, Perbeck’s photo seems to say, because soon enough, it’ll be inedible, unappetizing, as stripped of moisture as the cut blossoms that surround it.
Too late to pollinate: cut flowers and a buzzing visitor
Sometimes she resorts to symbols of decay that’d have been recognizable to a Dutch master: a fly in the folds of a bloom, a black plum at the bottom of a chain of red fruit, a sunflower, stripped of its yellow petals and nodding forward under the weight of its own prickly stamen. Most of the time, though, she’s too caught up in the moment of revelation to tarry too long on where we’re headed. In a series that combines the immediacy of a passing glance with the timelessness of daylight falling through glass, she takes us to a windowsill, and makes it the stage for quotidian drama. A bag of lemons, roughly held together by a yellow plastic mesh sack, balances precariously on the lip of the sill. The lemons on the top acting as an unsteady counterweight to those dangling on the bottom. A pair of bottles, one green, and one clear, casts a spectacular Coke-amber shadow on the wall behind them. In “Egg and Spoon,” the two protagonists face each other on the edge of disaster. Will the utensil slip and knock the egg off of its perch? Will it shatter on the floor? Or will they continue to coexist in a moment of tension and silent dialogue, catching the light on their matte surfaces, sharing ovoid kinship?
That same humor, irony, and accidental camaraderie between inanimate objects is present throughout the show. There’s a feeling that Perbeck is making gentle mischief, juxtaposing items and objects, playing with textural contrasts, telling wry stories. Much as she likes to dazzle us with effects — and the “Bottle Study” series catches her bending light waves with awestruck abandon — she’s always more of a storyteller than a sensationalist. The tales, when she tells them, are always human-scale, but their implications are as big as the arc of time itself.
Danger and similarity: "Egg and Spoon"
Midway through the exhibition, she puts the camera down and confronts us with a three dimensional still life. Bereft of the light captured in photographs, the objects seem less reified, less graceful, but not a bit less significant. Many of her favorite items come back for an encore, including lemons peeled and unpeeled, antique bottles, sheets of crumpled brown paper, copper mirrors, hard candy in cellophane wrappers, and a bag of popcorn positioned slightly askew. Two flowers loom over the proceedings like guardians, one erect, and one already beginning to bend and droop. She’s arranged them all with the care that only comes when a photographer, or a sculptor, or a passerby, has stopped to examine things as closely as she can — when she’s paused before happenstance and taken the time to truly see. You, Perbeck suggests, could do the same, if you don’t mind getting caught up in the psychedelic wonder of the commonplace.
(The Novado Gallery has some of the most generous hours of any art space in town. It’s open to the public from 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. on Friday.)
Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.
Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.
Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.
