Terry Evans’ fond memories of living and working in rural Kansas, as well as the stories she heard from her parents of their growing up in rural Missouri, come to life in her current photography show at the Carol Ehlers Gallery, formerly the Ehlers Caudill Gallery.
The photographs focus on Matfield Green, a tiny Kansas town where Evans has a darkroom and that reminded her of where her mother grew up. Her photographs are not meant to be docudramas, however, but artistic portrayals of picturesque prairie ranchland, which continues to change as it is abandoned and sometimes renewed.
Even though Evans, who moved to Chicago four years ago, takes many of her photographs from an airplane, she left those images out of this show because they will be part of another exhibit later this year at the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I love when you look at the ground from above, because you have a better idea of how things relate and a sense of order and scale, which you often don’t have when you drive through a place,” she says. “From above, there are fewer verticals to interrupt a perspective and there are more subtle changes in the land forms.”
Yet from terra firma, Evans also skillfully captures a sense of place that relays much about its changing scenery and the changing stories of the people who live and work there. “I think of my photography as similar to writing a novel. The prairie is the main character,” she explains.
Her photographic novellas come to life for two reasons: the intimacy of the compositions she frames and her choice of both color and black and white film. Depicting her characters and scenes in moments of abandonment and of renewal, Evans brings viewers intimately into her realms, yet she doesn’t moralize about what’s taking place. Some of her photographs even leave their storylines a bit unfinished.
“Abandoned Gym,” a gelatin silver print, portrays the interior of a gym with no sign of life in it, but there is no explanation whether it is no longer in use because people have moved away or because a new school has been built. “Dress/Shirt” in Ektacolor captures a waitress and a cowboy whose story could just as easily have been told in a ballad, Evans says. “Highway 50, Chase County, Kansas” gives viewers the sense that they are traveling along the isolated, rainy highway.
Some of her photographs involve multiple scenes, and here her narratives have a greater sense of completion. The diptych of “Jean & Steve Anderson & Howard Taliaferro and His Pigs,” also Ektacolor prints, show farmers in one frame and pigs in a pen in the other. The “Post Office — Now Owned By The Burlington Northern Santa Fe” is a gelatin silver print that consists of four separate photographs that show the recycling of a post office in its various incarnations.
When Evans started photographing in 1968, she worked in black and white, which she felt was appropriate for the mostly social documentary work she shot. When she began photographing landscapes, she felt she could show more information about the biology of the prairie if she worked in color and was, she says, quickly seduced by the color medium. Periodically, she feels she needs the rigor of working in black and white and shifts back. Fortunately, while working on this series, she felt compelled to photograph both ways.
The show continues at 750 N. Orleans St. through April 25. In addition to having her forthcoming Art Institute show, Evans has published two new photography books: `Disarming the Prairie” and “The Inhabited Prairie.”
Judith Raphael’s latest show of nine gouache paintings on paper at the Lyons Wier Gallery takes a slightly different emotional and aesthetic tack than in prior shows; several works are much more disarming and anxiety-ridden.
Though Raphael’s scenes are still peopled by young children and dogs, for the most part they no longer contain familiar-looking objects and scenery. There also is no parental presence, and the choice of bold background colors is blatantly unnatural, though rich and appealing.
Her young girls exhibit a sense of unease, as though something sinister were about to occur, as they strike rather stiff, unnatural poses, sometimes without clothing. Raphael’s girls are not in physical danger, even when menacing dogs are included; rather, they seem threatened by the advent of puberty. To add an ironic, humorous twist, she has placed some young females in well-known male poses, lifted from famous Western sculptures. A nude female off to one side of “Shady Lady” strikes the stance of Michelangelo’s “David.” With her hat firmly on, one hand securely posed on her hip and the other holding a pointed umbrella, she seems much more self-assured than the other female.
These works may reflect an evolution in this artist’s style or may simply represent a period of experimentation with a familiar theme; her next show will be eagerly awaited.
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The exhibit continues at Lyons Wier, 300 W. Superior St., until April 18.