In the most recent Oxford American, Editor Marc Smirnoff quotes photographer William Eggleston quoting another photographer: "Garry Winogrand once told me that you can take a good picture of anything. Anything." Liza Ryan proves Winogrand's point.
Prints from several series of the photographer's work, at G-C Arts Downtown, offer off-center fragments of bodies, effulgent clouds and corners of rooms. Any of these alone might constitute discovery of unexpected grace, but Ryan, who earned her bachelor of fine arts degree at Dartmouth College and her MFA at California State University at Fullerton, takes a step into potential narrative by juxtaposing them.
For instance, her Displacement series, from 1998 and 1999, consists of small chromogenic prints, each comprising two or three images, side-by-side. A fold-up bed is paired with a close-up of the "V" formed by the clavicle bones at the base of the neck. The auburn highlights of parted hair, viewed from above, harmonize with the warm tones of a sunlit bedroom to the left, while to the right a figure on a lawn exits the picture plane. The alienation of flesh from the places it makes or inhabits is one subtext you can pull from these joinings. Apparently they carry deeper resonances for Ryan, as the interiors are from homes of people she knew who died.
For the most part, these earlier works are crisply focused and chromatic, making the most of available, natural light. Ryan's The Weight of Light series, from 2000 and 2001, are light-jet prints from Polaroid exposures, sandwiched between Plexiglas sheets. Instead of fusing disparate images, Ryan sets them apart in horizontal sequences of two or three. The Plexiglas lends a sheen to the otherwise dark and fuzzy images, which are all but drained of color.
Again, parts of figures and places play off each other, or with views of sun-drenched clouds. In "Light #6," a torso with an arm crossed to clasp the other arm and a view of pavers and a doormat flank one of these ethereal compositions. Elsewhere the human element is missing. In "Light #5," a shot of shelved dishes and books is paired with a likewise vertical skyward view, and in "Light #3," in horizontal format, roiling clouds contrast with folded sheets on the edge of a weathered table. But the arrangements of these triptychs and diptychs (if you want to look at them that way) amount to another sort of composition, and the third in this suite, "Light #2," replaces the interior view with one of a hip and hand.
Again, the individual prints stand on their own. Ryan's concentration on parts of bodies amounts to abstracting them in more ways than one, reducing the body to components that trace unexpected patterns in generally empty space. Similarly, her close-ups of interior elements seem to remove them from context while oddly emphasizing their generally unseen human uses. And in this sense she recapitulates something of the Winogrand or Eggleston ethic, finding the unusual appeal of the usually ignored, making "a good picture of anything."
Arranged in new contexts, these parts of bodies, rooms and skies tell stories about the body's place, and placement, in the world—its just-another-object role and its role as builder and user of spaces. But three stand-alone compositions also speak to these ideas. "And Still I Lie Here Waiting" (2004) is a horizontal, side view of a torso, in almost-sepia tones, that composes something like a landscape, with a murky, green-brown sky beyond the "horizon." Ryan has traced thin, white lines along the shadowy contours of the abdomen, like roadways on a topo map. "Enough for Now" (2004) echoes something of this idea, with viny leaves curling around an arm.
"Fluid" (2005) is as magical as anything here. The nearly square, black-and-white image pictures a figure from the rear, in the low foreground, with long, wavy hair windswept upward, seemingly entangling itself in overhead tree branches. The figure in a coat composes a triangle as neatly as any Renaissance painting of the Holy Family, with the strands of hair pulling it into the upper half of the picture frame. As if to stress the point, a small triangle of neck flesh is exposed by the absent tresses.
Some serendipity is involved here, of course, but Ryan's skill lies in knowing what to do with it. She can make a sky speak of both light and its occlusion, a room disclose its missing occupants, or a desert of a dimple. That's making good pictures, and she makes something more by having them converse with each other.