The hallmark of compelling documentary photography is the seamless meld of form and content—striking subjects strikingly presented. You encounter a fine example as soon as you finish reading the introductory text for The Color of Hay: Ancient Peasant Ways of Transylvania, Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin's visual account of a year spent in rural Romania, exhibited at the Charleston Heights Arts Center Gallery through July 11.
"Petru and the Claie" is a fine-grained, richly toned black-and-white image, viewing from below a man pitchforking hay under a sweeping sky of cottony clouds. It's easily the most impressive image in the show, all black-and-white prints from McLaughlin's year, between 1999 and 2000, spent with a farming family in Maramures. McLaughlin, who earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001, clearly cherished the opportunity, which she saw as an attempt to document a passing way of life. The prints are in frames carved by Vasile Apan, a village gate-maker, and are complemented by texts written by McLaughlin's husband, Henry.
It's hard to imagine a critical view of the subject matter, but you wish McLaughlin had been, if not more objective, at least more visually daring. "The Harvest," showing a woman partly in profile with a sheaf of oats, has the air of a Millet painting, but most of the work is straightforward and presentational, here showing old women with traditional leg wrappings, there a younger woman in print skirts and vinyl pumps. They are composed and printed with a high degree of competence, but lack vitality. Except, that is, for "Pretending to Drink Like Men," a candid view of a group of old women joshing around. If only McLaughlin had made more images like that.
The Arts Factory's rear gallery, actually a lobby of sorts, is not the most commodious spot for displaying art, but Stewart Freshwater's drawings more than compensate for its shortcomings.
The selection of large-scale works on paper ranges from the mid-'70s to the present, and while the subjects change, a quirky sensibility and idiosyncratic graphic manner persist throughout. In later drawings, Freshwater shades and shapes volumes with squirrelly squiggles that look like tufts from dust bunnies, but the draftsmanship is keen and assured.
Among the earliest works, "Circus Syndrome #6" (1980) is a peculiar whimsy, the circus running itself after-hours, perhaps. Atop a sequence of three drum heads, a bear watches the giraffe he has just fulcrum-launched sail through three suspended hoops toward a circle-gathering of indistinct little creatures presided over by a clown. A suite of recent drawings, including "Angel of Baghdad" and "Perils of Iraq," comments on contemporary political events, juxtaposing large nude figures against scenes of fire and flood.
Elsewhere, lingerie models represent absent ideals or desires, especially in the 1990 drawing, "A Halo Dream, Left Holding the Pee Bag," whose other figure is a man seated with an IV tree supporting the title accessory.
Like his other works, it's unusual, a little upsetting, but fascinating.
Masterful BFA works
I've always avoided writing about student shows, but UNLV's art program turns out such accomplished graduates, it's hard not to be a little curious about what's around the bend. You have another day to check out the current BFA crop at the Donna Beam Gallery and nearby Tam Alumni Center.
You'll find the expected youthful earnestness and want of polish in some cases, but also some surprising refinement and heft. The photographic elements in Gayle Jones' "Trace" would be remarkable color prints alone, but they serve a peculiar installation wedged into a corner that includes a wavy, cutout, candy- flake copper fence and some sort of royal-blue severed vessel or tube. Yuen Wong mounts 32 molded white rabbits on seven silver-painted planks and calls it "69 Bunnies (19 Died)" (don't ask me...), but also executes a keenly drawn homage to 19th-century stop-motion photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Regan Blayne makes herself the subject (at least I assume it's her) in a orderly arrangement of scores of photo-booth snapshots.
Don't be surprised to see more of these young artists in the show.