Misty Keasler at photographs do not bend - Dallas

For her first one-person exhibition, Misty Keasler showed color photographs from two bodies of work. In 2000 a project sponsored by Buckner Orphan Care International took her into orphanages in Russia and Eastern Europe. Ten images from "Orphanage: Russia and Romania" filled one small gallery. While in Romania for Buckner the following year, she was taken to a residential complex originally designed as single-worker dwellings during the Communist era. "Silent Ghetto: Bucharest, Romania" depicts the apartment block's current incarnation as housing for gypsy families.

Keasler made many thoughtful portraits while working on her commission, but her main focus as an artist remains the structures that shape the lives of their inhabitants. Some of these buildings come from an architecturally grand era. Others are modern examples whose original devotion to functionalist design has lapsed into glumness. By examining their interiors, she portrays the orphanages as complex institutions dedicated to the daily business of housing and educating large numbers of children. Dozens of cotton diapers hang in a laundry room. A sign posted in a washroom lists the rules of behavior.

Keasler's one exterior shot of the Bucharest apartment house establishes the gridlike structure of the building. Inside she found seven floors divided into identical tiny dwellings. Beds are never more than a single mattress pushed against the wall. Hot plates and electric cookers serve as kitchens. There is no plumbing. This uniformity provides a rhythm and framework for Keasler's images. The variety here is in each family's efforts to personalize their apartment, and this gives these empty interior shots the feel of portraits. Keasler seldom depends upon a quirky detail to personalize the image for the viewer, however; her emphasis remains on how these people have organized the space to make it function as a home.

Working in low light without a flash demanded relatively long exposures, and so color suffuses these images. This soft light and saturated color ameliorate the harshness of the environment but do not distract from Keasler's unflinching and committed reportage. She has found a subject that allows her to exercise the combination of empathy and analysis that is at the heart of her documentary esthetic.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group