INCHOATE THOUGHTS
February 14, 2010
“KAREN GLASER:
DARK SHARKS/LIGHT RAYS”
Griffin Museum
of Photography, Winchester, Massachusetts
January 21
– March 28, 2010
Long known
for her underwater photography by available light alone, Karen Glaser has
recently produced two contrasting yet complementary bodies of work, one
focusing on sharks, the other on rays. While the rays are printed on slightly
mottled, long fiber Kozo paper, each pale image a mere six by nine inches, the
sharks inhabit sheets of photo rag four times this size. All are monochrome. If
the rays evoke delicate aquatints—Light
Rays (2007) looking like bleached Japanese kites—the sharks bring to mind
the stippled darkness of giant mezzotints.
Convinced
that humans have long had a visceral associative relationship with these
primeval creatures from a murky and scarcely accessible realm, Glaser presents
them in two registers. Several of her prints of rays show them clearly from
above, the rocky or sandy ocean floor giving them a naturalistic cast. Others,
notably her sharks, appear as shadows that have emerged from our psyches. No
other work suggests so convincingly that we might well carry within ourselves
profound psychic traces of our aquatic origins. Glaser sees this as a long-term
human constant, and provokes us to consider ourselves direct heirs to our
earliest ancestors who mastered the art of visual representation. In several
prints she explicitly evokes the subterranean world of Upper Paleolithic art,
even giving one the title Cave Painting
(2007). In this work and in several others, the granularity of enlargement
suggests an uneven surface, like that of living rock, on which scarcely
discernible forms of sharks and other fish hover. Such images are indeed
reminiscent of rock art produced over many millennia, including the maybe six
thousand-year-old silhouettes on the walls of the celebrated “Cave of the
Swimmers” at Wadi Sora, Egypt.
Although
all are enveloped in near darkness, Glaser’s sharks vary in the ways they
appear to be the subjects of waking dreams. Some of her hammerheads swim in a
soup of photo grain as sinuous, shadowy silhouettes, suggesting no recession (Big School, 2008). In other prints,
sharks swirl together as a complex disposition of forms conveying depth in
liquid space (Whale Shark, 2007).
Most disturbingly, we see no obvious signs of danger. There are no appraising
eyes, no threatening teeth. Sinuous muscularity alone reminds us of our
helplessness. Only subtle tonal variation along its body conveys the casual
ease with which a shark might deliver death (Dark Shark and Silver Tip,
2008).
Glaser
traveled to remote Pacific waters off the coasts of America, North and South,
to swim with these remarkable creatures. Working first with her camera, and
then with her enlarger in successive sites of tenebrous gloom, she visits
profound reaches of our evolutionary origins.