Lynn Davis at Edwynn Houk

In 1986, Lynn Davis began a photographic cycle of great monuments in the tradition of 19th-century landscape photographers, minus the cumbersome apparatus of the view camera. Her travels first took her to the icebergs of Greenland, where she abandoned the human form as subject and produced a widely known and much admired portfolio of iconic images of icebergs, monumental in scale.

Fifteen years into her trek and nearing its announced conclusion, Davis followed a seventh-century pilgrim's route along the Northern Silk Road in China. Several years before her visit, the Chinese government completed a diversion channel to redirect the Yangtze River around the construction site for the world's largest hydroelectric dam. A folly of immense proportions, the dam is intended to span Three Gorges Valley in Hubei province, displacing its people, destroying a breathtaking landscape and sub-merging more than 1,200 archeological sites.

Davis favors the twin-lens reflex camera often preferred by archeologists, which produces a generous, 2 1/4-inch square negative. These superbly toned and printed images, many of them 40 to 45 inches square, seem at close viewing as monumental as Davis's subjects. Two of the prints included in this exhibition and dated 2001 are the products of a visit to Three Gorges. Warmed by a gold toning process, Three Gorges, Yangtze River, China seems shrouded in mist. Bearded passages of vegetation cling to steep rock, and the strong Yangtze current spills diagonally along the bottom of the frame. In the lower left, Davis has located a man-made pole, diminutive to the point of disappearing, painted with the sort of stripes that mark a measurement or warn of hidden danger. In a similarly toned image of the same title, numbered later in the series, the land on the far side seems to roll massively into the distance, partially eclipsing a setting sun.

In the sepia- and selenium-toned Emin Minaret of Suleiman Mosque, Turpan, China, Davis contemplates markers of stepped paving that suggest multiple perspectives; all are struck through on the diagonal with a stark, ascending dentate shadow leading to the looming cone of the minaret. The wide flights of Cemetery Steps, Dunhuang, China fill the frame, adrift in sand blown from dunes in the near distance. Davis also assembled multiple prints of the many figures included in 1000 Buddha Piece, Yangang Caves, paving them in vertical panels as two separate works, one negative and the other positive. They resemble rubbings from a stone. Davis's strong sense of formal abstraction has informed her work throughout the many years of her watchful pilgrimage, while her pursuit of the anima within world monuments has led her to create elegiac images for modern, troubled times.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group